Do corporate tax cuts increase investments?

This paper studies the effect of corporate taxes on investment. Since firms with a foreign parent have more cross-country profit shifting opportunities than domestically owned firms do, their effective tax rate and, consequently, their tax-induced costs to investment are lower. We therefore expect capital investment responses to a corporate tax cut to be heterogeneous across firms. Using firm-level data on German corporations, we exploit the 2008 tax reform, which substantially cut corporate taxes as an exogenous policy shock and expect domestically owned firms' investments to be more responsive to the reform. We show exactly this in a difference-in-differences setting. We find that the reduction in corporate tax payments led to a one-to-one increase in the real investments of domestic firms. The effect is stronger for domestic firms relying more on internal funds. Correspondingly, labor investment increased more for domestic firms, ensuring a constant mix of input factors. In addition, we show that domestic firms' sales grew faster after the tax cut than the sales of foreign-owned firms. Our results imply that corporate tax changes can increase corporate investment but that domestic firms benefit more than foreign-owned firms from a tax cut through higher investment responses resulting in greater sales growth.     

Leverage and Taxes: Evidence from the Real Estate Industry

Finance theory has long viewed corporate income taxes as a potentially important determinant of corporate financing decisions and capital structures. But finance academics have been unable to provide convincing empirical evidence of a material effect of taxes on corporate leverage, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for marginal corporate tax rates, and hence for the tax benefits of debt, for large samples of individual companies. The authors address this by analyzing leverage decisions in an industry whose publicly traded entities are organized either as taxable corporations, or as real estate investment trusts (REITs) that effectively avoid entity level taxation. This enables them to measure the relative tax benefits of debt with greater precision while controlling for important nontax characteristics that affect debt usage. The tax hypothesis predicts that for real estate firms with similar asset portfolios, taxable firms should have more debt than their nontaxable counterparts. Both the nontaxable and the taxable real estate firms in our sample routinely have more than twice the leverage of industrial firms, which suggests that factors other than taxes are contributing to their use of debt. But among real estate firms, tax status appears to play a much weaker role. Taxable firms have significantly more leverage only after 2000, when restrictions on REITs were removed through new regulations that made their operations much more like those of taxable real estate firms. Our findings also depend on real estate characteristics—most notably, only residential real estate firms demonstrated differences that are consistent with the tax hypothesis. Taken together, the authors’ findings suggest that although taxes do seem to matter, their role is clearly secondary relative to factors such as the nature of the firm’s assets. A generous interpretation of our evidence puts the effect of taxes between one‐third and one‐half of that implied by prior research.     

Firm-level political sentiment and corporate tax avoidance

This paper examines how managers' tone on political issues in earnings conference calls relates to corporate tax avoidance. We find a positive relationship between managers' tone of using political linguistics and tax avoidance, while controlling for non-political tone. The relationship is more pronounced for firms with greater political exposure, higher lobbying expenditures, greater information asymmetry, and more risk-taking. The empirical results remain robust with various additional checks. Overall, our evidence suggests that managers employ the sentiment of political risk disclosure for aggressive tax purposes.     

Sharing Risk with the Government: How Taxes Affect Corporate Risk Taking

Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk‐taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its downside. Consistent with this prediction, we find that risk taking is sensitive to taxes, albeit asymmetrically: the average firm reduces risk in response to a tax increase (primarily by changing its operating cycle and reducing R&D risk) but does not respond to a tax cut. We trace the asymmetry back to constraints on risk taking imposed by creditors. Finally, tax loss‐offset rules moderate firms’ sensitivity to taxes by allowing firms to partly share downside risk with the government.     

Debt and taxes: Evidence from the real estate industry

Compelling empirical evidence documenting a material effect of corporate taxes on leverage decisions is limited, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for the firm's tax benefit of debt. We examine leverage decisions across taxable and nontaxable real estate firms—firms for which we can measure the relative tax benefit of debt with little error. The tax hypothesis implies that for firms with similar asset portfolios, taxable firms should have more debt than their nontaxable counterparts. Consistent with this, leverage ratios of taxable real estate firms are higher than their nontaxable counterparts, but the magnitude of this difference is at most one-half of that implied by studies that employ simulated marginal tax rates.     

Taxes and Corporate Policies: Evidence from a Quasi Natural Experiment

We document important interactions between tax incentives and corporate policies using a “quasi natural experiment” provided by a surprise announcement that imposed corporate taxes on a group of Canadian publicly traded firms. The announcement caused a dramatic decrease in value. Prospective tax shields partially offset the losses, adding 4.6% to firm value on average, and vary with the tax status of the marginal investor. Further, firms adjust leverage, payout, cash holdings, and investment in response to changing tax incentives. Overall, the event study and time series evidence supports the view that taxes are important for corporate decision making.     

The effect of taxes on multinational debt location

We provide new evidence that differences in international tax rates and tax regimes affect multinational firms' debt location decisions. Our sample contains 8287 debt issues from 2437 firms headquartered in 23 different countries with debt-issuing subsidiaries in 59 countries. We analyze firms' marginal decisions of where to issue debt to investigate the influence of a comprehensive set of tax-related effects, including differences in personal and corporate tax rates, tax credit and exemption systems, and bi-lateral cross-country withholding taxes on interest and dividend payments. Our results show that differences in personal and corporate tax rates, the presence of dividend imputation or relief tax systems, the tax treatment of repatriated profits, and inter-country withholding taxes on dividends and interest significantly influence the decision of where to locate debt and the proportion of debt located abroad. Our results are robust to firm and issue specific factors and to the effect of legal regimes, debt market development, and exchange rate risk.     

Why Capital Income Taxes Survive in Open Economies: The Role of Multinational Firms

This paper discusses the role of multinational firms and double taxation treaties for corporate income taxation in open economies. We show that it is optimal for a small open economy to levy positive corporate income taxes if multinational firms are taxed according to the full taxation after deduction system or the foreign tax credit system. Positive corporate taxes also occur in the asymmetric case where some countries apply the exemption system and others apply the tax credit system. If all countries apply the exemption system, the optimal corporate income tax is zero. We also show that, under tax competition, corporate income taxes are not necessarily too low from the perspective of the economy as a whole. While the undertaxation result is confirmed for the case of the exemption system, tax rates may also be inefficiently high if the deduction or the credit systems are applied.     

Tax avoidance in family firms: Evidence from large private firms

Ownership structure plays an important role in firms’ decisions on tax avoidance. Recently, the effect of family ownership on corporate tax avoidance has become an issue of increasing interest among scholars from both the fields of family business research and tax research; however, empirical findings have so far remained ambiguous. Based on a unique sample of 678 large private firms from Germany, we show that for unlisted large firms (i) family firms avoid more tax than non-family firms, (ii) tax avoidance increases with the percentage of family ownership, and (iii) tax avoidance is a function of the number of shareholders. We interpret our results as evidence that benefits from avoiding taxes outweigh the non-tax costs in the case of large private family firms in Germany. Furthermore, as the number of family shareholders increases, family firms satisfy increasing demand for dividends by avoiding taxes.     

The Effect of Volume of Intrafirm Transfers on Market Metrics

In this paper, we examine the relationship between international intrafirm area transfers and market metrics as measured by market-to-book value and systematic risk. Intrafirm transfers – the amount that multinational corporations charge one another for the transfer of goods, intellectual property, and services – have become an increasingly important issue for policymaking, managerial, financial, and tax purposes. This paper also examines whether international intrafirm intergeographic area transfers are attributed to corporate tax. We find that firms with a sizable volume of international intrafirm transfers have higher systematic risk than comparable firms without these transfers. We show cross-sectionally that firms engage in international transfers have a higher market-to-book ratio, suggesting that transfers add value through their effect on earnings and taxes. Consistent with Mills and Newberry (2003) and Collins, Kemsley, and Lang (1998), we document that U.S. (global) income tax is positively (negatively) related to intrafirm transfers, implying that U.S. multinational firms shifted taxable income to the United States from 1995 to 1999.     

Corporate tax avoidance: data truncation and loss firms

Loss firms are an economically significant and growing segment of the population of publicly traded corporations. Relatively little is known about the tax positions of loss firms because the firms are typically dropped from tax avoidance studies. We develop a new measure of corporate cash tax avoidance that is meaningful for all observations and reflects the extent to which a firm is tax-favored. We examine the extent to which inferences about corporate tax avoidance over the past twenty-seven years change when we examine the full population of firms, as opposed to a profitable and/or taxable subsample. In contrast to prior research findings, our results suggest that on average firms are tax-disfavored, by which we mean cash taxes paid exceed the product of the firm’s pre-tax book income and the statutory tax rate. In addition, many industries that appear to be tax-favored in profitable subsamples are tax-disfavored when the entire population is examined. We also find that the extent to which firms are tax-disfavored is increasing over time, and that domestic firms are more tax-disfavored than multinationals.     

Reciprocity in Corporate Tax Compliance—Evidence from Ozone Pollution

In a tax—public goods reciprocity framework between citizens and the state, managers view taxes as a payment to the government in exchange for public goods, and hence they adjust their willingness to pay taxes as public good quality changes. We show that corporate tax planning intensity increases with ground-level ozone pollution. Revisions in ozone pollution regulations cause counties that failed the revised and more stringent standards to reduce ozone pollution. Consequently, firms headquartered in these counties reduced corporate tax planning intensity relative to firms in other counties. The ozone-tax link varies in the predicted directions with public attention to pollution, potential welfare loss due to ozone, managers’ stakeholder orientation, taxpayers’ polluting status, political preferences, and civic norms. We also find consistent results for Superfund cleanups of hazardous waste sites. Our research sheds light on reciprocity as a potential mechanism influencing corporate tax compliance.     

How do CEO incentives affect corporate tax planning and financial reporting of income taxes?

We examine how different accounting metrics used to evaluate CEO performance for annual bonuses affect the level of corporate tax planning as well as financial reporting for income taxes. We predict and find that firms using cash flow metrics report lower GAAP and cash effective tax rates (ETR) than firms using earnings metrics. We also find that firms using after-tax earnings metrics report lower GAAP ETRs but similar cash ETRs as firms using pre-tax earnings metrics. Further analyses show that firms using after-tax earnings metrics are more likely to designate foreign earnings as permanently reinvested and have lower discretionary reserves for tax uncertainty. Hence, it appears that both types of firms engage in similar levels of tax planning, but firms evaluating CEOs with after tax-earnings metrics incentivize different financial reporting choices.     

Effective labor taxation and the international location of headquarters

Profit taxes are widely acknowledged to influence the location of firms’ headquarters. This paper sheds light on the role of aspects of labor taxation for the international location of headquarters. While profit taxes can be avoided in various ways, it is much harder for firms to manipulate the firm-specific labor tax base so that labor taxes may be relatively important for firm location. We construct a unique data set of effective labor taxes in 120 countries and use data on the location of 35,206 firms to analyze the impact of labor income tax rates, the progressivity of the income tax schedule, and social security contributions on firms’ decisions where to locate their headquarters. The findings suggest that both a higher progressivity of the tax system and higher (employee- and employer-borne) social security contributions negatively influence a country’s attractiveness for headquarters location. Hence, a one percentage point increase in these payroll taxes, reduces the probability of a country to attract headquarters by 6.1 %. The results prove robust in various empirical model specifications and subsets of the data.     

Valuation implications of socially responsible tax avoidance: Evidence from the electricity industry

Prior literature suggests that firms may bear reputational costs associated with corporate tax avoidance, which could in turn reduce the net present value of firms’ tax planning strategies. However, these studies do not consider the fact that firms may have opportunities to avoid tax in socially responsible ways. We investigate the equity valuation implications of one form of socially responsible tax avoidance: claiming the renewable electricity production tax credit (PTC). We predict and find that investors more positively value tax savings generated from PTCs compared to other forms of corporate tax avoidance, consistent with the notion that socially responsible tax avoidance should not subject firms to reputational costs. Additionally, consistent with the role that CSR can play in enhancing a firm’s reputational capital, we find evidence of a spillover effect in which investors more positively value other sources of tax avoidance to the extent the firm also reduces its taxes in a socially responsible way. Our results demonstrate the importance for managers to consider socially responsible tax avoidance as a component of a firm’s tax planning portfolio and for policymakers to recognize the appeal of socially responsible tax strategies as the reputational consequences of tax avoidance become more prominent.     

Financial leverage clienteles: Theory and evidence

This paper examines the hypothesis that investors will sort themselves out into tax-induced ‘financial leverage clienteless’ in which the common stocks of highly levered firms will be held by individuals with low personal tax rates, while the shares of firms with little or no leverage will be held by individuals with high personal tax rates. Although the idea of financial leverage clienteless has appeared in the literature before, the immediate motivation for this investigation is a recent paper by Merton Miller. In that paper he argues that under the current U.S. tax structure, personal taxes will offset corporate taxes such that in equilibrium the value of any individual firm will be independent of its use of debt financing. We extend his analysis to show specifically the way in which financial leverage clienteles would come about in his assumed tax environment. We then conduct some direct empirical tests of the leverage clientele hypothesis. These tests can also be viewed as indirect tests of Miller's new proposition on the irrelevance of capital structures. The results of the tests are mixed: The relationship between corporate leverage policies and investors' tax rates is statistically significant, but its magnitude is less than would be predicted by the theory.     

Intangible investment and Ramsey capital taxation

The standard analysis of optimal fiscal policy aggregates different types of assets into a unique capital good and all types of capital taxes into a unique capital tax. This paper considers a disaggregated framework: an economy with corporate and dividend taxes, where firms invest in both tangible and intangible assets (which can be expensed or sweat). In our setup, firms can always respond to changes in the timing of taxation. We find that the optimal long-run policy features zero corporate taxes and positive dividend taxes, with labor and dividend taxes being identical. Moreover, the initial capital levy is relatively small.     

Corporate site visit and tax avoidance: The effects of monitoring and tax knowledge dissemination

This study examines how institutional investors' corporate site visits affect tax avoidance. Using quantile regressions, we find that corporate site visits decrease tax avoidance for firms at high levels of tax avoidance and increase tax avoidance for firms at low levels. The effect of corporate site visits on tax avoidance is stronger for firms subject to a weaker information environment, which suggests that institutional investors acquire additional firm-specific information via corporate site visits and play a more effective monitoring role. We also find that visitors who visited low-tax firms in prior years share tax-planning knowledge with high-tax firms which they visit in the current year. The effect of tax knowledge transfer is more pronounced when the visitors are from incumbent institutional shareholders. This study identifies corporate site visits as a channel via which institutional investors serve as monitors to managers and as facilitators of tax knowledge transfer.     

Incentives for corporate tax planning and reporting: Empirical evidence from Australia

This study extends prior research on the willingness of firms to significantly decrease their corporate taxes. It specifically examines the associations between corporate tax avoidance and the reported significant uncertainty of a firm’s tax position, the tax expertise and tax affiliations of its directors, and the performance-based remuneration incentives of its key management personnel. Based on a dataset of 200 publicly listed Australian firms over the 2006–2010 period (1000 firm years), we find that the reported uncertainty of a firm’s tax position, the tax expertise of its directors, and the performance-based remuneration incentives of its key management personnel are significantly positively associated with tax avoidance. Conversely, firms with board members who have at least one tax-related affiliation are significantly negatively associated with tax avoidance.     

Do corporate governance characteristics influence tax management?

This paper investigates how corporate governance plays a role in long-run tax management and contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, we add insight into the horizon problems related to executive and director compensation and show that incentive compensation provides long-term incentives to improve performance by establishing a link between higher pay-performance sensitivity and lower taxes. Second, this is one of the first papers, to our knowledge, to empirically examine the role of governance in corporate tax management from a long-term perspective in order to better understand the lasting effects of governance. We find that incentive compensation drives managers to make investments into longer-horizon pay outs such as tax management. Furthermore, we find that this investment into tax management benefits shareholders; better tax management is positively related to higher returns to shareholders. We also address the endogeneity issues of corporate governance and performance measures. Finally, our paper is unique in examining which type of tax management strategy (domestic or foreign) different firms focus on. Our results shed light into how governance can improve firm performance and increase shareholder value in the long run.