Impact of foreign operations on reported effective tax rates: interplay of foreign taxes, U.S. taxes and U.S. GAAP

Effective tax rates can have a significant effect on a firm’s cash flows and reported earnings. As the operations of U.S. companies become increasingly global in scope, an important issue is how their foreign operations impact their effective tax rates, and, in turn, their reported earnings. This study describes how foreign taxes, U.S. taxes, and U.S. accounting principles interact to determine the impact of foreign operations on a firm’s effective tax rate. This analysis will assist users of financial statements in assessing the quality of earnings, making interfirm comparisons, evaluating the performance of management, judging the risks of additional tax assessments, and predicting future effective tax rates.     

Speaking for the enslaved: heritage interpretation at antebellum plantation sites

Everyday resistance is a fruitful realm of study in tourism analysis. Rooted in in-depth ethnography, this article focuses on the everyday resistance in a Chinese Miao village, where the villagers were defending their interests in the context of elite-directed and capital-intensive tourism development. It reveals how particular incidents of resistance configured among these villagers, and pays particular attention to their internal politics and the cultural underpinnings of their resistance acts. Responding to various situations, these Miao peasants made rational choices among possible trajectories of action. If the resistance was direct, it was not open; if it was open, it was not direct. They, as the dominated, worked the existing system to their advantage: they cleverly utilized policy gaps to persist in their resistance; and they strategically used tourists as the scapegoat to resist the dominant. Despite the marginality and temporariness of the results, their resistance did affect the various forms of exploitation that they confronted, and was therefore significant in the sense that it narrowed the options available for the dominant regarding tourism development.     

Latin America: Taking the Helm

The eyes of the world are locked on Europe these days.This is understandable.After all,the storm in the euro area casts a long shadow over the entire global economy.But the IMF has 187 members,and my job is to serve each and every one of them as effectively as possible.Like so many in the region,Latin America countries have done remarkably well over the past few years.They have harvested the fruits of strong fundamentals,sound policy frameworks,and prudent macroeconomic policies and are now enjoying sustained growth with reduced vul-nerabilities,an enviable sweet spot.     

Financial Services Industry PAC Contributions and Senate Committee Membership

This paper explores the relationship between relevant senate committee membership and campaign contributions from financial services industry political action committees (PACs) from 1998 to 2002. Since this was a period of significant legislative activity affecting the industry, it provides a fruitful time period to investigate the relationship between contributions and committee membership. It is found that membership on the Senate Banking Committee is consistently related to contributions from financial services PACs. Membership on the Senate Finance Committee is related to PAC contributions from some sectors of the industry for some time periods. It is also found that contributions are significantly higher for those senators facing re-election in the particular election cycle. The importance of relevant committee membershipto PAC contributions in the senate is consistent with previous work dealing with the House.     

Learning the “Craft” of Auditing: A Dynamic View of Auditors' On‐the‐Job Learning

We investigate how auditors learn the technical aspects of their professional role while performing client engagements, and how that learning process has been shaped by changes in societal, economic, and regulatory forces. Prior studies explicitly recognize that auditors need social skills and demeanor consistent with professional norms as well as requisite knowledge, but those studies generally focus on the processes through which new auditors are molded toward consistency with social norms. In contrast, we focus on forces affecting the transfer of technical knowledge from supervisor (guide) to subordinate (learner) in the everyday work setting. Our evidence derives from semi‐structured interviews with 30 relatively new and more experienced audit partners at one Big 4 firm, thus spanning multiple “generations” of experience. Results confirm that auditors primarily acquire technical knowledge on the job, through the interactions among individual engagement team members. However, partners express concern about changes in the practice environment that may limit effectiveness of on‐the‐job learning, including characteristics of personnel, the approach to formal training at induction, supervisors' reluctance to provide candid feedback, regulatory and economic pressures, and the increased distraction, and reduced interpersonal contact associated with the use of information technology. At the end of the day, our findings raise implications for practice regarding the difficulty of developing effective learning conditions for auditors in the face of these challenges.     

A Lobbying Approach to Evaluating the Whistleblower Provisions of the Dodd‐Frank Reform Act of 2010

We evaluate the net costs and benefits of the whistleblower (WB) provisions adopted under the Dodd‐Frank Reform Act of 2010 by examining investor responses to events related to the proposed regulations. We focus our main analysis on a sample of firms that lobbied against implementation of the WB provisions by submitting a comment letter to the SEC. Lobbying firms are characterized by weaker existing WB programs and greater degrees of managerial entrenchment than a matched control sample of similar non‐lobbying firms. Short‐window excess stock returns around events related to implementation of the WB rules are significantly more positive for the portfolio of lobbying firms than for their matched controls; this effect is also more pronounced for lobbying firms with weaker existing WB programs. These results suggest that investors expect the new WB provisions to provide net benefits by improving shareholder protection.