This paper examines whether the preference for nature conceived during CEOs’ childhood will govern their decisions when operating a company. Using the latest findings in social ecology studies, this paper constructs an exogenous proxy of CEOs’ preference for nature protection using...

This paper examines the role of environmental taxes in corporate investment decisions. Using data on firms in Spain and leveraging an emission tax increase in 2013 in the autonomous Community Valenciana, we provide evidence that environmental taxes reduce investment. Surprisingly, this effect...

This paper examines the role of personal income taxes in multinationals’ corporate tax–induced profit shifting. As required by corporate tax rules in most countries, firms need economic substance in low–corporate tax countries to justify profit shifting to these countries. Because higher...

We examine how performance management practices that render employee accomplishments transparent in an organization depend on employees’ hierarchical level. We consider a principal-agent model of an organization where the principal contracts directly with a group of higher-level agent-workers...

We examine the effects of trade secret protection laws on firms’ internal transparency. By internal transparency, we refer to the extent to which information is integrated, distributed, and shared within the firm. We argue that stronger trade secret protection reduces firms’ proprietary...

Economists broadly agree that the economic burden of corporate taxes is not entirely borne by shareholders, but also borne in part by employees and consumers. We examine corporate tax avoidance in a setting where shareholders do not bear the entire economic burden of the corporate tax. We show...

We examine how creditor rights affect the trade-off between non-debt and debt tax shields. Using four bankruptcy reforms, a panel of private and public firms, and tax return data from Italy, we show that laws empowering creditors reduce tax avoidance and increase debt financing, consistent with...

We investigate the development of non-performing loans (NPL) held by European banks along the economic cycle. During the global financial crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis, banks from all European countries experienced a substantial increase in NPLs. We find that these increases...

This paper examines the corporate investment effect of a time limit on the use of net operating losses (NOLs). We predict that, when countries limit the use of NOLs to a few years instead of allowing indefinite use, managers of loss-making firms have an incentive to increase investments to...

We study whether and how financial analysts choose tone during earnings conference calls as a means to acquire information from the firm’s management. Analyzing 32,963 analyst-managerinteractions during conference calls of the S&P 500 firms, we document that analyst questions that are...