Explore the vast range of titles available.

We investigate the relation between tax avoidance and tax uncertainty, where tax uncertainty is the amount of unrecognized tax benefits recorded over the same time period as the tax avoidance. On average, we find that tax avoiders, i.e., firms with relatively low cash effective tax rates, bear significantly greater tax uncertainty than firms that have higher cash effective tax rates. We find that the relation between tax avoidance and tax uncertainty is stronger for firms with frequent patent filings and tax haven subsidiaries, proxies for intangible-related transfer pricing strategies. The findings have implications for several puzzling results in the literature.

This study exploits the implementation of IRS Schedule UTP to examine how linking tax return disclosures to financial reporting for income taxes affects firms' reporting decisions. Using confidential tax return data and public financial statement data, I find that after imposition of Schedule UTP reporting requirements, firms report lower financial reporting reserves for uncertain income tax positions, but do not claim fewer income tax benefits on their federal tax returns. The reduction in reserves is concentrated among multinational firms and firms with larger reserves prior to Schedule UTP. These findings suggest that some firms changed their financial reporting for uncertain tax positions to avoid Schedule UTP reporting requirements without changing the underlying positions. In contrast with prior studies, this evidence represents a permanent, rather than a temporary, tax-induced reporting change. My results imply that linking tax return disclosures to financial reporting can have unintended effects on firms' reporting decisions.

We quantify the importance of collateral versus taxes for firms' capital structures. We estimate a dynamic model in which a taxable firm seeks financing for investment, and a dynamic contracting environment motivates endogenous collateral constraints. Optimal leverage stays a safe distance from the constraint, balancing the tax benefit of debt with the cost of lost financial flexibility. We estimate this flexibility cost to be 7.2% of firm assets, a percentage that is comparable to the tax benefit. Models with different tax rates fit the data equally well, and leverage responds to the tax rate only when taxes are low.

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 firm's tax positions from its tax reserve accrual. Our study links public disclosures of tax reserves with mandatory private disclosures of tax shelter participation as made to the Internal Revenue Service's Office of Tax Shelter Analysis. We find strong, robust evidence that the tax reserve is positively associated with tax shelters, while other commonly used measures of tax avoidance are not. Based on out-of-sample tests, we also show that the reserve is a suitable summary measure for predicting tax shelters. The tax benefits of tax shelters are economically significant, accounting for up to 48% of the aggregate FIN 48 tax reserves in our sample.

We investigate whether tax avoidance becomes more uncertain as the rate of tax avoidance increases. We estimate a system of equations to demonstrate that as firms' pretax income increases, each additional dollar of potential tax results, on average, in 32.8 cents of tax avoided, which we refer to as incremental tax avoidance. Of the incremental tax avoided, 1.4 cents represent additions to the reserve for uncertain tax benefits (UTB reserve), or 4.3 percent of the total incremental tax avoided. We then partition sample firms into groups that prior research suggests engage in higher rates of tax avoidance, and examine the amount of incremental tax avoidance that results in additions to the UTB reserve. Results demonstrate that the percentage of incremental tax avoidance reflecting additions to UTB reserve is not larger for groups engaging in higher rates of tax avoidance, suggesting higher rates of tax avoidance may not be more uncertain.

Using a new measure of financial constraints based on firms' qualitative disclosures, we find that financially constrained firms—firms that use more negative words in their annual reports—pursue more aggressive tax planning strategies as evidenced by: (1) higher current and future unrecognized tax benefits, (2) lower short- and long-run current and future effective tax rates, (3) increase in tax haven usage for their material operations, and (4) higher proposed audit adjustments from the Internal Revenue Service. We exploit the unexpected closures of local banks as exogenous liquidity shocks to show that firms' external financial constraints affect their tax avoidance strategies. Overall, the linguistic cues in firms' qualitative disclosures provide incremental information beyond traditional accounting variables or commonly used effective tax rates to reveal and predict tax aggressiveness, both contemporaneously and in the future.

Deloitte's 2007 PCAOB Part II report identifies, among other issues, concerns related to the audit firm's quality controls with respect to auditing income tax accounts. We investigate whether Deloitte's actions to remediate the PCAOB's concerns are associated with changes to their clients' financial reporting for income taxes. We find that Deloitte's clients increased the reported valuation allowance on deferred tax assets and increased the reported reserve for uncertain tax benefits (UTBs) in response to increased auditor scrutiny over income tax accounts. Additionally, we find that in subsequent periods, Deloitte's clients report valuation allowances and UTB balances that are not significantly different than other annually inspected auditors, consistent with Deloitte changing the quality controls related to audits of income tax accounts after the failed remediation of the 2007 Part II report.

In this paper, I discuss the concepts of tax aggressiveness and tax risk from an academic point of view. Although tax aggressiveness is often defined as being in the \"eye of the beholder,\" this is not terribly satisfactory when attempting to measure empirically tax planning aggressiveness and its associations with firm attributes. I explain that tax planning that results in certain tax benefits should not constitute aggressiveness. Although policy makers may argue that these tax planning opportunities are attributable to tax loopholes, this assertion does not imply that the firm has undertaken any significant risk by entering into such tax planning. By documenting that low effective tax rates are not necessarily associated with risky or uncertain tax planning, I hope to convince future researchers to develop better empirical proxies for capturing aggressive tax planning.

In this paper, we examine the impact of the economic crisis and the policy reaction on inequality and relative poverty in four European countries: France, Germany, Ireland and the UK. The period examined, 2008–13, was one of great economic turmoil, yet it is unclear whether changes in inequality and poverty rates over this time period were mainly driven by changes in market income distributions or by tax-benefit policy reforms. We disentangle these effects by producing counterfactual (‘no reform’) scenarios using tax-benefit microsimulation and representative household surveys for each country. For the first stage of the Great Recession, we find that the policy reaction contributed to stabilising or even decreasing inequality and relative poverty in the UK, France and, especially, Ireland. Market income changes nonetheless pushed up inequality and relative poverty in France. Relative poverty increased in Germany as a result of policy responses combined with market income changes. Subsequent policy reforms, in the later stage of the crisis, had markedly different cross-country effects, decreasing overall poverty in France, increasing it in Ireland, and giving mixed effects for different subgroups in Germany and the UK.

We suggest the first large-scale international comparison of labor supply elasticities for 17 European countries and the United States using a harmonized empirical approach. We find that own-wage elasticities are relatively small and more uniform across countries than previously considered. Nonetheless, such differences do exist, and are found not to arise from different tax-benefit systems, wage/hour levels, or demographic compositions across countries, suggesting genuine differences in work preferences across countries. Furthermore, three other findings are consistent across countries: The extensive margin dominates the intensive margin; for singles, this leads to larger responses in low-income groups; and income elasticities are extremely small.