Despite the human capital in corporate tax departments representing the average firm's most direct and substantial investment in tax compliance and planning, our understanding of it is limited. Using employee movement between the tax departments of publicly-traded U.S. corporations, we shed...

We examine whether similarities in legal, sociological, and cultural characteristics between countries (country-pair homophily) affect foreign director appointments. Our results from estimating a gravity model, which includes economic and geographic country characteristics, indicate that...

We empirically examine two competing claims: first, if a firm's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity is driven by its CEO's private rent extraction (i.e. an agency problem), firms with higher CSR ratings are poorly governed and their managers are less likely to be dismissed for poor...

This paper presents the staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) method in an accessible language to a broad accounting research audience from an applied researcher's perspective. Specifically, the paper examines DiD design problems when multiple units are treated and when the treatment is...

I examine the effects of occupational licensing on the quality of certified public accountants (CPAs). I exploit the staggered adoption of the 150-hour rule, which increases the educational requirements for a CPA license. The analysis shows that the rule decreases the number of entrants into the...

Using a hand-collected sample of Italian family and non-family-controlled firms, we investigate the moderating effect of family ownership on the relation between earnings management and CEO turnover. Consistent with agency theory, we find a positive and significant relation between earnings...

Despite the human capital in corporate tax departments representing the average firm's most direct and substantial investment in tax compliance and planning, our understanding of it is limited. Using employee movement between the tax departments of publicly-traded U.S. corporations, we shed...

When hiring new workers, employers often screen large numbers of written applications before selecting a subset for more costly, in-person interviews. A large literature suggests that information frictions lead to screening on imperfect quality signals - e.g., educational pedigree and...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

We examine the extent to which the labor market facilitates the diffusion of tax planning knowledge across firms. Using a novel dataset of tax department employee movements between S&P 1500 firms, we find that firms experience an increase in their tax planning after hiring a tax employee from a...