Aggressive corporate tax planning has existed throughout history and will likely continue for as long as corporations are subject to tax. However, the degree of corporate tax aggressiveness can ebb and flow depending upon the legal environment and whether corporations believe the benefits exceed...

This study estimates the corporate tax savings from financial derivatives. I document a 3.6 and 4.4 percentage point reduction in three-year current and cash effective tax rates (ETRs), respectively, after a firm initiates a derivatives program. The decline in cash ETR equates to $10.69 million...

Financial derivatives play an increasingly common role in corporate tax avoidance. This paper takes a descriptive approach to answer the fundamental, yet under explored, questions of why derivatives are useful for corporate tax avoidance and how they fulfill this objective. To evaluate why, I...

The issue of tax-motivated income shifting within multinational firms – or “base erosion and profit shifting” (BEPS) – has attracted increasing global attention and has become the subject of an ongoing OECD initiative. This paper provides a simple conceptual framework that helps to...

I investigate whether sustainable institutional investors influence their investee firms’ corporate tax avoidance. My results suggest that higher sustainable institutional ownership mitigates the tax avoidance of investee firms. In contrast, the level of ownership by non-sustainable...

The public criticism of corporate tax planning that emerged in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis reflects a changing societal norm about corporate tax planning. While a growing body of research suggests that societal norms influence personal income tax decisions, more research is...

Using data from the annual reports of over 100,000 subsidiaries of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from 55 countries between 2003 and 2012, the authors of this article investigate the impact of exchange-of-information agreements ("EOI agreements") on tax-motivated income shifting. Transparency...

The relationship between tax authorities and large corporate taxpayers is a concern world-wide as can be seen from the 2008 OECD Study into the Role of Tax Intermediaries. In the United Kingdom, HMRC have been developing a risk rating approach to tax risk management as part of their Review of...

Using the implementation of "Golden Tax Phase III" as a quasi-natural experiment, we take the difference-in-differences (DID) method to examine how changes in taxation technology affect firm donations. Specifically, "Golden Tax Phase III" has reduced the donation level of private enterprises...