To encourage economic development in specific regions and industries, the Chinese Central and local governments offer a series of corporate income tax incentives (tax exemptions, reduced tax rates, tax holidays and tax refunds). In China, parent and subsidiary companies are consolidated for...

We empirically examine the profitability of leading Chinese firms, benchmarked against comparable US firms, for the period 2005-13. Return on invested capital (ROIC), which excludes leverage effects on performance, provides the primary metric. Averaged over firms and years, the two sets of firms...

We document that Chinese city officials are more likely to be promoted if firms under their jurisdictions receive less negative media coverage towards their term-ends. Consequently, local officials suppress negative news of local companies at their term-ends. Such distortion worsens the...

This study investigates whether network ties via sharing the same individual auditor influences the diffusion of tax avoidance knowledge. We find that firms with greater connection to low-tax firms through audit partners have lower effective tax rates (ETRs), consistent with tax avoidance...