Many features of U.S. tax policy towards multinational firms – including the governing principle of capital export neutrality, the byzantine system of expense allocation, and anti-inversion legislation – reflect the intuition that building “strong fences” around the United States...

This paper analyzes the impact on firm behavior of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S. multinationals. The analysis controls for endogeneity and omitted variable bias by using instruments that identify the...

The use of tax havens by multinational corporations (MNCs) has attracted increasing attention and scrutiny in recent years. This paper provides an exposition of the academic literature on this topic. It begins with an overview of the basic facts regarding MNCs' use of havens, which are...

The use of tax havens by multinational corporations (MNCs) has attracted increasing attention and scrutiny in recent years. This paper provides an exposition of the academic literature on this topic. It begins with an overview of the basic facts regarding MNCs' use of havens, which are...

The consequences for countries of past foreign rule are the subject of a vast literature across history and the social sciences. This paper constructs a novel measure of past foreign (or minority) rule - the genetic distance of a country's ruling elite in the year 1900 from the country's ethnic...

This paper reviews recent evidence analyzing the link between earnings management and corporate tax avoidance and considers the implications for how policymakers should evaluate the financial reporting environment facing firms. A real-world tax shelter is dissected to illustrate how tax shelter...

Tax havens have attracted increasing attention from policymakers in recent years. This paper provides an overview of a growing body of research that analyzes the consequences and determinants of the existence of tax haven countries. For instance, recent evidence suggests that tax havens tend to...

Do corporate tax avoidance activities advance shareholder interests? This paper tests alternative theories of corporate tax avoidance that yield distinct predictions on the valuation of corporate tax avoidance. Unexplained differences between income reported to capital markets and to tax...

Legal rules, politics and behavioral factors have all been emphasized as explanatory factors in analyses of the determinants of the concentration of corporate ownership and stock market participation. An extension of standard tax clientele arguments demonstrates that changes in the progressivity...

This paper analyzes the links between corporate tax avoidance and the growth of high-powered incentives for managers. We develop a simple model that highlights the role of feedback effects between tax sheltering and managerial diversion in determining how high-powered incentives influence tax...