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...

We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 corporate tax executives to investigate firms' incentives and disincentives for tax planning. While many researchers hypothesize that reputational concerns affect the degree to which managers engage in tax planning, this hypothesis is difficult to test...

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...