Economists and political scientists have long been interested in factors that affect the statutory tax rate on businesses set by federal governments. In this study, we examine the impact of political and economic factors on several measures of tax rates and tax incentives offered across 19...

This paper reassesses evidence of anticipatory income smoothing reported in DeFond and Park (1997) in light of knowledge about the shortcomings in the model used to identify the managed component of reported earnings. Our tests demonstrate that the empirical results reported in DeFond and Park...

In this paper, we examine the relation between the inadequate levels of capital during the recent financial crisis and the shareholder dividend and stock repurchase activities in the banking industry. In 2008, the Treasury Department initiated a bailout of the banking industry through the...

We examine whether the recent public outcry over executive compensation has had an impact on the level of executive compensation and/or the sensitivity of cash compensation to firm performance. Cross-sectional analyses for a sample of 186 firms show that post-1993 compensation levels have risen...

Recent accounting and finance literature has introduced the term returns synchronicity, the relation of firm-specific returns to market-wide and industry-wide returns. This paper evaluates the power of fundamental synchronicity, proxied by financial accounting performance measures, to explain...

This study uses publicly-available information to examine the information content of executive-created Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs) using executive corporate stock. GRATs have the potential to transfer excess returns tax-free to beneficiaries and hence many GRATs may be funded with...