Criminal law enforcement depends on the actions of public agents such as police officers, but the resulting agency problems have been neglected in the law and economics literature (especially outside the specific context of corruption). We develop an agency model of police behavior that...

This paper presents a new approach to estimating the existence and magnitude of tax-motivated income shifting within multinational corporations. Existing studies of income shifting use changes in corporate tax rates as a source of identification. In contrast, this paper exploits exogenous...

The effect of mandatory securities regulation on firm value has been a longstanding concern across law, economics and finance. In 2012, Congress enacted the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (“JOBS”) Act, relaxing disclosure and compliance obligations for a new category of firms known as...

The issue of tax-motivated income shifting within multinational firms has attracted increasing global attention in recent years. It is of central importance to many current policy debates, including those related to recent initiatives by the OECD on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) and to...

The reform of corporate and business taxation is central to current tax policy debates in the United States. This paper provides a framework for analyzing reform proposals by describing the lessons from current economic research for business tax reform, addressing both international and domestic...

Cross-border tax evasion has emerged in recent years as a central issue in tax enforcement. Traditionally, the legal regime governing cross-border tax enforcement was based on information exchange upon request. In 2010, the US Congress enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA),...

An extensive literature has analyzed the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation enacted in 2002, but its social welfare consequences remain controversial. One of the most significant provisions of SOX – auditor attestation of internal controls under Section 404(b) – has been applied only to firms...