Employee turnover is a significant cost for businesses and a key human capital metric, but firms do not disclose this measure. We examine whether turnover is informative about future firm performance using a large panel of turnover data extracted from employees’ online profiles. We find that...

To constrain the use of intangible assets in tax-motivated state income shifting, many U.S. state governments adopted addback statutes. Addback statutes reduce the tax benefits that firms can gain from creating intangible assets such as patents. Using a sample of U.S. public firms, we examine...

This study examines the effect of managers' career concerns on tax avoidance using the staggered recognition by state courts of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD), a trade secret protection doctrine which places greater restrictions on managers from joining or forming a rival company. We...

Income taxes are a major expense for profitable corporations, oftentimes 25 percent or more of pretax income. This study exploits a setting – the market for corporate control – to test competing agency-based and risk-based explanations of corporate tax planning. Exploiting the staggered...

Using a hand-collected sample of U.S. multinational firms’ foreign and domestic cash holdings, we evaluate the earnings persistence implications of changes in foreign and domestic cash and whether stock prices reflect such implications. Building on the earnings decomposition approach in...

We examine the effect of increased book-tax conformity on corporate capital structure. Prior studies document a decrease in the informativeness of accounting earnings for equity markets resulting from higher book-tax conformity. We argue that the decrease in earnings informativeness impacts...

Most prior studies model tax avoidance as a function of firm-level characteristics and do not consider how individual executive characteristics affect tax avoidance. This paper investigates whether executives with superior ability to efficiently manage corporate resources engage in greater tax...

We examine whether internal governance affects the extent of real earnings management in U.S. corporations. Internal governance refers to the process through which key subordinate executives provide checks and balances in the organization and affect corporate decisions. Using the number of years...

There is an on-going debate in the literature about the costs and benefits of conforming book and taxable income. Proponents argue that increased book-tax conformity will reduce aggressive financial reporting because managing earnings up increases taxes and will curtail abusive tax shelters...