One institutional feature behind China's spectacular economic growth is its political selection system, which it uses to promote officials who are capable of growing local economies. Against this backdrop, we examine how political turnovers cyclically influence firms' tax avoidance behavior....

In 1993, I published a paper advocating a destination-based corporate income tax (DBCT) (Avi-Yonah, 1993). Under DBCT, multinational enterprises (MNEs) would be treated as unitary businesses and taxed based on where they sell their goods or services, i.e., on a destination basis rather than (as...

Our study finds evidence consistent with U.S. multinational firms disguising domestic acquisitions as corporate reorganizations to avoid repatriation-related taxes. Prior to a 2017 tax reform, we find that a combination of high potential repatriation costs and large overseas earnings balances is...

Using employment history data from LinkedIn, we report the number and characteristics of employees who joined public corporations after leaving the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from 1980 to 2012. Public corporations hired more than 1,200 former IRS employees, a number similar to the number of...

We examine the effect of CEO narcissism on an especially aggressive form of corporate tax avoidance: tax sheltering. Narcissism is a multifaceted personality trait associated with a sense of superiority and a propensity to engage in questionable behavior. Narcissists feel that they are above the...

Any proposal for adoption of a unitary tax (UT) system ought to clear the first and most common hurdle of its compatibility, or lack of it, with the current norms in the international tax system – specifically, the current tax treaty network. This paper argues that unitary taxation is...

Using the multiple indicator-multiple cause (MIMIC) approach, this paper generates a novel global database by estimating the size of the shadow economy for 157 countries over 1991 to 2017. The results suggest that the OECD countries are by far the lowest with values below 20% of off official GDP...

The 135 member countries in the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS are considering the adoption of a global minimum corporate income tax for taxing multinationals as part of the Pillar Two (GloBE) proposals for taxing the digital economy. This article provides a detailed analysis of the global...

In 2009, Japan began to exempt dividends paid by Japanese-owned foreign subsidiaries to their parent firms from home-country taxation. This tax reform switched Japan's corporate tax system to a territorial tax system that exempts foreign income from home-country taxation. In this paper, I...