We investigate the degree to which corporations can manipulate their accounting of expenses to avoid taxes, and estimate the corresponding effects for corporate tax bases. We exploit a unique corporate tax reform in Texas that replaced a 4.5% profits tax with a much broader 1% tax on gross...

Voluntary tax disclosure has become increasingly important in corporate sustainability reporting, particularly following new standards introduced by the Global Reporting Initiative combined with heightened public pressure and stakeholder demands. We examine tax aggressiveness and country...

The tax literature of the past two decades has been dominated by empirical studies on corporate tax avoidance. What this literature lacks, however, are a quantitative synthesis of these studies and an in-depth discussion of potential convergences and divergences in empirical findings. To...

This study analyzes how the Big Five personality traits and professional experience affect the aggressiveness of tax preparers' recommendations. To this aim, we conduct a survey among tax professionals of a Big Four accounting firm and tax students. Using treatment-effects regressions, we find...

This paper examines the disciplining effects of credit markets on corporate tax avoidance strategies. We show that, during adverse credit market conditions, firms with refinancing needs prefer to forgo the after-tax cash flow benefits of tax avoidance to regain the access to the traditionally...

Many studies use GAAP effective tax rates (ETR) as proxies for tax avoidance and rely on the maintained assumption that very low (high) ETRs represent the greatest (least) tax avoidance. We provide large-sample empirical evidence on how well ETRs capture cross-sectional differences in tax...

We identify a pecuniary externality arising from corporate tax avoidance. Firms share risk with the government via taxation. The lower the tax rate applied to a firm's earnings, the more risk is borne by its shareholders. As more firms engage in avoidance in the aggregate, the variance of the...

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...

A study examined private companies’ tax aggressiveness and its changes in response to interventions by the tax administration. While scholars have researched authorities’ interventions extensively, this study was the first to consider the “light” technique of tax adjustments made by the...