We develop a model to examine the effects of Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Interpretation No. 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes (FIN 48), on the strategic interaction between publicly-traded corporate taxpayers and the government. Several of our findings contradict...

We examine whether public disclosures of tax reserves recently made available through Financial Interpretation No. 48 (FIN 48) reflect corporate tax shelter activities. Understanding this relation is important to corporate stakeholders and researchers keen to infer the aggressive nature of a...

I examine whether and to what extent tax uncertainty affects a firm's dividend payouts. Based on the argument that tax uncertainty impairs the persistence and predictability of after-tax cash flows, I hypothesize and find that firms with greater tax uncertainty exhibit a lower probability of...

We study the relation between patent concentration and tax-motivated income shifting. Using affiliate-level data for European multinational corporations (MNCs) and employing the relative share of patents held by an MNC as a measure for patent concentration, we predict and find that tax-motivated...

Following a merger or acquisition, a target firm's effective tax rate decreases on average by 3 percentage points. This decline is as high as 8 percentage points when the acquiring firm is tax aggressive. Further, target firm profitability decreases, particularly in the case of targets having a...