Institutional quality and capital taxation

We describe the preferred taxation regime in a small economy with uncertain institutional quality. We obtain that a preferential taxation regime in which taxes can be matched to the mobility of the tax base may be worse off than a non-preferential taxation regime in which taxes are constant across bases with distinct mobility. Since the small economy takes foreign taxes as given, our result is not driven by a downward pressure on revenues caused by unconstrained tax competition. It is instead related to the ability of a non-preferential taxation regime to credibly convey information about the institutional quality of the small economy. We present some empirical evidence which corroborates our results.     

Corporate income taxation in Lithuania in the context of the EU

This paper explores Lithuania's competitiveness in the area of corporate income taxation. In order to assess how much freedom of action the country has in designing its own corporate income tax policy, the process of EU tax harmonization is analyzed by evaluating justification for tax harmonization, the major developments and the main outcomes of this process. Lithuania's corporate income tax system is compared with the systems in the other EU countries. Following a macro backward-looking approach, the paper calculates the measures of effective profit tax burden. Effective tax burden measures are computed for the whole enlarged EU. Such calculations are still rare in the economic literature.     

Innovation quality of firms with the research and development tax credit

This paper examines innovation quality of U.S. research tax credit users (i.e., firms with currently earned research tax credits). Prior literature reports that the research tax credit is effective in increasing research and development (R&D) expenditures and reducing managers’ myopic behavior. However, little is known about the real (or economic) effect of R&D tax credits, as most of these findings have been based on estimated R&D tax credits rather than actual R&D tax credits. Additionally, some researchers and the government still have concerns about the real effect of R&D tax credits by criticizing the ambiguity and complexity of the tax codes (IRC Section 41). Therefore, I use actual R&D tax credits identified in firms’ 10-K and state R&D tax credits as identification tests to reduce endogeneity issues. My results indicate that research generating R&D tax credits contributes to better innovation quality and higher return volatility but lower pre-tax profitability. Overall, these findings imply that enacting the R&D tax credit provisions would trigger better innovation.     

Corporate carbon assurance and the quality of carbon disclosure

Based on an international sample, this study examines the association between corporate carbon assurance and carbon disclosure. We find that companies that adopt carbon assurance tend to have better carbon disclosure quality than their unassured peers. Cross-sectional analyses demonstrate that the positive relationship is stronger in stakeholder-oriented countries. We also document that carbon assurance plays a substitutive role for country-level carbon regulation and social trust. Further analyses suggest that carbon assurance has differential impacts on specific types of carbon disclosure and the quality of carbon disclosure increases with the percentage of reported emissions assured and the level of carbon assurance.     

Free trade taxation and protectionist taxation

The goal of this paper is to seek new insight regarding international tax policy by recasting it in parallel with the theory of international trade. This is accomplished by defining a free trade taxation regime as one that is consistent with an efficient worldwide allocation of capital, and evaluating within this perspective various aspects of tax policy, such as value-added (axes, integration, income shifting, and the choice of worldwide or territorial system of taxes.Compatibility with free trade is not the only standard against which to judge an international tax system. Nevertheless, as national economies become more integrated the importance of international taxation for the efficient functioning of capital markets will become a central policy issue.     

Corporate lobbying in the UK: an analysis of attitudes towards the ASB's 1995 deferred taxation proposals

This paper models corporate lobbying behaviour with respect to the ASB's 1995 discussion paper on deferred taxation. The study makes improvements to the methodology applied in prior studies. It expands the definition of lobbying beyond the submission of comment letters. It extends the analysis to control for past lobbying behaviour. It uses multinomial logistic regression to consider those companies lobbying in favour, those lobbying against, and those that did not lobby. The findings suggest that size and past lobbying behaviour are key determinants of the decision to lobby. In addition, companies that lobbied against the proposals were more likely to have debt covenants than were those that lobbied in favour. Debt covenants, however, did not explain the difference between non-lobbyists and lobbyists against. Companies that lobbied in favour were more likely to experience incentive compensation effects than were those that lobbied against. There was some evidence of the influence of US listing.     

Power and ideas: The development of retirement savings taxation in Australasia

New Zealand and Australia have adopted vastly different approaches to retirement savings and its associated taxation. Two fundamental differences exist: New Zealand offers little in the way of tax incentives for retirement savings and there is no compulsion for retirement savings; Australia provides highly concessionary tax incentives and has a mandatory occupational retirement savings scheme. This paper uses a historical institutionalism theoretical framework to investigate the events that led to these diverse approaches in retirement savings taxation between two countries that frequently adopt similar policy ‘solutions’.The research highlights the importance of power and ideas in the policy development process. Power imbalances among institutions and individuals facilitated the pursuit of tax and retirement savings policy arrangements that were aligned with the world view of privileged elites. Ideas justified the policy direction adopted in each country and assisted in legitimising the power granted to actors and institutions that supported the prevailing ideology. The strongest ideas were found in New Zealand, where reform was the most radical.     

Corporate governance quality: Trends and real effects

This paper constructs a composite index of corporate governance quality, documents its evolution during the 1994–2003 period in selected emerging and developed economies, and assesses its impact on growth and productivity of the economy and its corporate sector. Our investigation yields three main findings. First, corporate governance quality in most countries has overall improved, although in varying degrees and with a few notable exceptions. Second, the data exhibit cross-country convergence in corporate governance quality with countries that score poorly initially catching up with countries with high corporate governance scores. Third, the impact of improvements in corporate governance quality on traditional measures of real economic activity—GDP growth, productivity growth, and the ratio of investment to GDP—is positive, significant and quantitatively relevant, and the growth effect is particularly pronounced for industries that are most dependent on external finance.     

Corporate governance roles of information quality and corporate takeovers

We examine the corporate governance roles of information quality and the takeover market with asymmetric information regarding the value of the target firm. Increasing information quality improves the takeover efficiency however, a highly efficient takeover market also discourages the manager from exerting effort. We find that perfect information quality is not optimal for either current shareholders’ expected payoff maximization or expected firm value maximization. Furthermore, current shareholders prefer a lower level of information quality than the level that maximizes expected firm value, because of a misalignment between current shareholders’ value and total firm value. We also analyze the impact of antitakeover laws, and find that the passage of antitakeover laws may induce current shareholders to choose a higher level of information quality and thus increase expected firm value.     

Capital market research in taxation: Do it in China!

Starting from MM’s theories, we discuss some important topics in capital market research in taxation. We use this article to introduce intuitions and techniques of capital market research in taxation to Chinese researchers. While it is apparent that many Chinese researchers have already mastered these techniques, we hope that more researchers will be interested in this line of research. We believe that China provides fertile ground for capital market research in taxation.     

Balancing the regulation and taxation of banking

This study gives an overview of bank taxation as an alternative to prudential regulations or non-revenue taxation. We review existing bank taxation with a view to eliminating distortions in the tax system, which have incentivized banks to engage in risky activities in the past. We furthermore analyze taxation of financial instruments trading and taxation of banking products and services and their ability to finance resolution mechanisms for banks and to ensure their stability. In this respect, we put forward the following arguments: (1) that a financial transaction tax is economically inefficient and potentially costly for the economy and may not protect taxpayers; (2) that a bank levy used to finance deposit guarantee and bank resolution mechanisms is potentially useful for financial stability, but that it poses the threat of double taxation, together with the proposed Basel-III Liquidity Coverage Ratio; and (3) that we support the elimination of exemption from value added tax (VAT) for financial services in order to provide banks with a level playing field, while retaining exemption for basic payments services. This is expected to improve efficiency by reducing the wasteful use of financial services.     

Corporate diversification,institutional investors and internal control quality

This study investigates the relationship between corporate diversification, institutional investors and internal control quality. Using a sample of firms disclosing internal control information from 1999 to 2011, the results show that corporate diversification is positively associated with the likelihood of internal control weakness. Moreover, this relationship is stronger (weaker) when firms have higher transient (dedicated) institutional ownership, indicating that transient (dedicated) institutional investors increase (mitigates) the internal control problems arising from diversification. This study contributes to the literature by providing evidence on the role of corporate diversification in the quality of internal control.     

Distortionary taxation and the free-rider problem

This paper derives a version of the Samuelson rule which takes into account that a distortionary Ramsey-tax system is used to finance public-goods provision. Individuals have private information about their public-goods preferences. Moreover, individuals differ in their productive abilities. The incidence of taxation in the Ramsey model implies that more productive individuals have a lower willingness to pay for public goods than less productive individuals. They are therefore tempted to understate their valuation of public goods and less productive individuals are inclined to exaggerate theirs. The paper characterizes an optimal rule for taxation and public-goods provision that eliminates these biases.     

Gender-based and couple-based taxation

In this paper, I explore the optimal taxation of singles and couples in an economy with bargaining couples. The government is concerned with the redistribution of income from individuals with high utility to individuals with low utility, recognizing that some individuals live in couple households where resources are unevenly distributed. I analyze how redistributive linear income taxes, which depend on either gender or household composition (or both) impact the distribution of utility within and across households. An interesting implication arising from the interaction between the model elements is that even though between-group lump-sum transfers always favor women, when the bargaining power of men is high, women are subject to a higher tax rate; this in contrast to previous analyses of gender-based taxation. My quantitative analysis demonstrates that the welfare effects of gender-based taxation are sizable and even larger when taxes depend on the composition of the household.     

Regime-switching debt and taxation

The effects of changes to the tax rate are studied within a framework where an estimated regime-switching process for the debt-output ratio is embedded in a standard growth model. The regime is a hidden state variable, so agents face a signal extraction problem. Consequently, agents incorporate the possibility of switching to different fiscal regimes when forming expectations over future taxes. Decision rules have additional nonlinearity relative to fixed-regime models. Income allocation and the tax elasticity of investment depend on agents’ inference regarding the regime. Specifically, the tax elasticity can be either positive or negative, depending on whether agents perceive a tax reform as an intra-regime shock or change in regime.     

Administrative corruption and taxation

Administrative corruption, whereby taxpayers and collectors collude to reduce remissions, is central to tax evasion in developing countries. A framework is developed for the analysis of such corruption, based on imperfect information concerning true tax liabilities. Some tolerance of corruption can be part of an efficient collection system, especially when there are constraints on government wages or effort is required to learn payers' tax liabilities. With variable collector effort a certain amount of corruption is required, together with a two-level penalty structuredismissal if revenue targets are not met and much heavier penalties for gross corruption.     

Value-added taxation and consumption

One of the main rationales for taxing consumption rather than income is that it is believed that consumption taxes discourage consumption, encourage savings, and thus generate higher economic growth. However, empirical evidence on the actual effectiveness of consumption taxes in stimulating savings is very limited. In this paper, we estimate the impact of a broad-based consumption tax, the value-added tax (VAT), on the aggregate consumption of fifteen European Union countries over the period 1961–2005. Our empirical results indicate, across a variety of estimation methods and specifications, that a one percentage point increase in the VAT rate leads to roughly a one percent reduction in the level of aggregate consumption in the short run and to a somewhat larger reduction in the long run.     

Bank profitability and taxation

This paper investigates how banks’ activity is affected by the corporate income tax. For this purpose it uses aggregate data on all main components of the profit and loss account and on the interest rate applied on loans and on deposits for the banking sector of the main industrialized countries during the period 1981–2003. With such information we are able to disentangle the extent to which a bank is able to shift its tax-burden forward to its borrowers, depositors, and purchasers of fee-generating services. The main result is that the taxation of banks’ profit is equivalent to a taxation on loans and as such it exerts a substantial impact on the composition of banking sector revenues. However credit intermediaries have the ability to shift a substantial part of their corporate income tax burden and therefore differences in the level of taxation cannot explain the dispersion observed in banks’ net profitability across industrialized countries.