This paper examines the ability of financial statement measures of average and marginal tax rates to capture tax attributes utilizing a matched sample of firm-level tax return and Compustat data.The results suggest that commonly used average tax rate measures provide little insight about annual...

I present evidence consistent with managers using derivatives and discretionary accruals as partial substitutes for smoothing earnings. Using 1994-1996 data for a sample of Fortune 500 firms, I estimate a set of simultaneous equations that captures managers' incentives to maintain a desired...

Multinational firms have been accused by politicians, regulators, and citizen groups of shifting profits to low-tax geographic areas. We present evidence that multinational firms with tax-haven operations tend to aggregate their geographic disclosures to a greater extent. The results are...

Companies are adopting executive compensation recoupment ("clawback") policies to discourage aggressive financial reporting choices. Recent research suggests clawback policies might encourage other, less aggressive, means of meeting earnings expectations. We suggest that reducing income tax...

This paper examines the effect that lead independent directors serving on the board have on corporate tax policy. Through reviewing and approving board meeting agendas, lead independent directors (LIDs) could affect corporate tax policy by influencing the tax-related content in board meeting...

Multinational firms have been accused by politicians, regulators, and citizen groups of shifting profits to low-tax geographic areas. We present evidence that multinational firms with tax-haven operations tend to aggregate their geographic disclosures to a greater extent. The results are...

Building on recent theory, we find strong and robust evidence that external labor market incentives motivate CEOs to adopt more aggressive tax policies in order to improve firm performance and their own labor market value. In addition, we find that the tax aggressiveness-labor market incentives...

We find that managers with military experience pursue less tax avoidance than other managers and pay an estimated $1–$2 million more in corporate taxes per firm-year. These managers also undertake less aggressive tax planning strategies with smaller tax reserves and fewer tax havens. Although...

Because so many multinational firms now use tax havens, researchers can move beyond using a simple dichotomous tax haven characteristic to identify tax-avoiding firms. Using recent advances in textual analysis proposed by Hoberg and Moon (2017, 2018), this paper uses the qualitative information...

To date, there is mixed evidence on the implications of tax avoidance on firm value as measured by Tobin's q or stock price reactions. The take-away from prior literature is that increased opportunities for rent extraction associated with tax avoidance (e.g., in low governance firms), might...