Tax evasion has been an important issue in the accounting literature for several decades, but the focus has been on corporate income taxes. We develop a new way to examine tax evasion that focuses on corporate transactions, rather than corporate profits. Specifically, we examine how commodity...

Technological advances have impacted the sales tax more than any other tax imposed in the U.S. Technology creates new problems and sales tax evasion and avoidance opportunities, but also may provide business and governments with the tools to solve them. We discuss how technological developments...

This paper provides an economic evaluation of the state corporate income tax (CIT) in an open economy environment characterized by highly mobile capital. We find little economic justification for the state CIT, but recognize that it is not likely to be replaced in the foreseeable future. The...

States’ ability to collect taxes on business, and particularly on interstate business activity, appears to be diminishing. This should not be a surprising outcome since economists have for many years recognized the difficulties for sub-national governments to collect taxes on mobile activities...

The effective state corporate tax rate fell significantly during the past fifteen years despite the very robust growth in corporate book profits. This article examines the causes of the decline with a focus on the effects of the relatively new option of forming limited liability companies...

We examine why and when some local governments choose to reach a legal sales tax rate maximum while others do not. We employ a duration model to study Tennessee local option sales taxes between 1975 and 1999. Our results show that between 1975 and 1984, counties with lower sales tax capacity...

This study examines business organizational form decisions as a source of tax base mobility. We posit that organizational form responses to state tax policy allow for an indirect means of exploring mobility through business tax planning. Using state-level IRS data for the years 1997–2008, we...

States have independent taxing powers that create conflicts between tax autonomy and economic efficiency. Policymakers can minimize that tradeoff by developing effective working relationships between the federal and state governments and frameworks to guide tax policy decisions. However, little...

A model is developed which focuses on the relationship between fiscal variables and industrial location. Industrial location decisions are hypothesized to be made within a system of supply and demand. On the supply side, communities determine the optimal level of industrial activity based on a...

Success in the FIFA World Cup provides countries with substantial international visibility. This paper uses this information shock associated with the World Cup to show that visibility has a significant impact on trade flows. In isolating the visibility effect, two identification problems are...