We examine the relation between client tax aggressiveness and auditor's resignation decision. Consistent with the agency view of tax avoidance which suggests that client tax aggressiveness can increase litigation and reputational risk to auditors and increase the potential conflict with...

Increasing the conformity between accounting earnings and taxable income has been proposed to improve financial reporting and curtail aggressive tax planning. We find, however, that increasing conformity results in earnings that are less informative. Our inquiry exploits a unique sample of firms...

A number of recent studies assume market efficiency and hence interpret an association between stock returns and leading indicators as evidence of the contribution of such indicators to future earnings. We explicitly examine (i) whether one leading indicator - order backlog - has predictive...

This paper explains firm disclosures of the tax benefits of employee stock options and discusses the implications of this disclosure for academic research studies and financial statement users. We do this in order to show that there are important implications for empirical research studies and...

We examine whether executive stock options (ESO) encourage managers to make risky investments on behalf of shareholders. For a sample of oil and gas producers, we find, as predicted, that the variance of cash flows from exploration activity and the extent of price risk exposure hedged are...

In a recent working paper, Plesko (1999) uses confidential tax return data to evaluate alternative measures of corporate average and marginal tax rates and concludes quot;The results suggest that commonly used measures of average tax rates provide little insight about annual corporate tax...

We demonstrate that the effect of special items on the time-series of seasonally-differenced quarterly earnings differs from the effect of other components of earnings. Focusing on earnings four quarters subsequent to the special item where the time-series differences are most pronounced, we...

We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 tax executives to better understand corporate decisions about real investment location and profit repatriation. Our evidence indicates that avoiding financial accounting income tax expense is as important as avoiding cash taxes when corporations decide...

Using data from a survey of tax executives, we examine the corporate response to the one-time dividends received deduction in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. We describe the firms' reported sources and uses of the cash repatriated and we also examine non-tax costs companies incurred to...

Most prior studies model tax avoidance as a function of firm-level characteristics and do not consider how individual executive characteristics affect tax avoidance. This paper investigates whether executives with superior ability to efficiently manage corporate resources engage in greater tax...