Increasing the conformity between accounting earnings and taxable income has been proposed to improve financial reporting and curtail aggressive tax planning. We find, however, that increasing conformity results in earnings that are less informative. Our inquiry exploits a unique sample of firms...

This paper examines the implications for multinational firms of recent proposals to conform tax and financial reporting (i.e., book-tax conformity). Proponents of book-tax conformity argue that the current dual system in the U.S. allows firms to simultaneously manage their taxable income down...