The impact of tax holidays on earnings management: An empirical study of corporate reporting behavior in a developing-economy framework

This study investigates whether foreign investment enterprises (FIEs) in China alter their corporate reporting behavior in response to a known schedule of tax-rate increases. The context of this investigation is a tax-incentive scheme that allows firms to pay taxes at a reduced rate for a limited period of time, and then at a higher rate when this period expires. If managers attempt to maximize firm value by minimizing tax costs, then the spread of tax rates in the periods surrounding the rate change may provide a substantial incentive for them to accelerate revenue and defer expenses. Consistent with this hypothesis, the empirical results indicate that firms report significantly higher discretionary current accruals for the years before tax-rate increases. The evidence, which indicates that firms manage earnings upward to take advantage of lower tax rates that are available in certain years, has important implications for tax policymakers.     

Insider Ownership and Firm Value: Evidence from Real Estate Investment Trusts

Real estate investment trust (REIT) provides a unique laboratory to study the relation between insider ownership and firm value. One, a REIT has to satisfy special regulations which weaken alternative mechanisms to control agency problems. Empirically, I find a significant and robust nonlinear relation between Tobin's Q and REIT insider ownership that is consistent with the trade-off between the incentive alignment and the entrenchment effect of insider ownership. Two, many REITs are Umbrella Partnership REITs (UPREITs) which have dual ownership structure. They have both common shares and Operating Partnership Units (OP units). Property owners can contribute their properties to the UPREIT in exchange for OP units. Their capital gains taxes remain deferred as long as they hold onto their OP units and the UPREIT does not sell the properties they contributed. OP units owners are locked in with the firm and have incentive to monitor firm management, but their interests diverge from the common shareholders because their tax bases are much lower. Consistent with the trade-off between positive monitoring effect of OP units and tax-induced agency costs, I find that UPREIT's firm value increases with the fraction of OP units, but the effect is significantly weaker for the UPREITs where insiders hold OP units.     

逃税规模的衡量

逃税造成了政府财政收入的减少,因而政府理所当然地关心社会中的逃税程度,而且逃税程度的大小也代表了一国税务机关税收征管成效的高低.因此从这个意义上讲,对逃税规模的衡量就显得必要了.不过,由于纳税人的逃税行为是隐蔽的,故很难对逃税规模进行直接有效的衡量,尽管如此,还是存在一些方法从侧面去测算一国的逃税规模的.     

政府补贴能否促进高新技术企业的自主创新？——来自中关村的证据

中国政府对高新技术企业投入了大量补贴以激励它们创新,但是对补贴效果的研究并未达成一致结论。基于中关村3万多个高新技术企业2001-2012年的观察值,本文同时采用PSM与DID法对政府补贴的效果进行了研究,结果发现:第一,整体而言,政府补贴显著提高了创新经费支出、新产品销售收入和专利申请数量;第二,进一步将创新细分为自主创新和购买引进新技术之后发现,政府补贴存在“挤出效应”:被补贴企业的自主创新明显下降,而购买引进新技术显著增加;第三,政府补贴对企业的短期创新激励有显著的促进作用,但是对长期创新激励的促进作用不显著。本文对高新技术企业的补贴效果提供了实证绩效评估,所得出的结论有助于政府优化和调整激励创新政策。     

The effects of location-based tax policies on the distribution of household income: Evidence from the federal Empowerment Zone program

Location-based tax policies are redistributive as evidenced by their placement in distressed areas. However, the previous literature has focused on mean effects which can mask important effects that the program has on the distribution of households. Therefore, we extend the literature by studying changes in the entire household income distribution, in the context of the federal Empowerment Zone (EZ) program. We do not find evidence that the impoverished residents benefited from the program. Our findings are consistent with the areas becoming more attractive to high-income households. The improvements in the areas were concentrated in those portions of each zone that were relatively better-off prior to EZ designation. The results confirm the prior literature findings that the areas, on average, became more attractive but also suggest that the benefits of the program likely did not accrue to the lower-income residents of the EZ areas.     

Integrating corporate ownership and pension fund structures: A general equilibrium approach

This paper studies pension fund design in the context of investment in the debt and equity of a firm. We employ a general equilibrium framework to demonstrate that: (i) the asset location ‘puzzle’ is purely a partial equilibrium phenomenon, conceived in a risk neutral setting, that disappears with the introduction of sufficient risk aversion; (ii) the inability of policy makers to manage an economy with multiple firms yields a mixed equilibrium, where bonds are observed in both taxable and tax-deferred accounts; and (iii) the Pareto-efficient pension plan comprises of a defined benefit plan.     

The determinants of tax morale in Pakistan

This paper examines the determinants of tax morale in Pakistan, a country that has struggled with low tax effort over the past decade. We exploit novel data for individual taxpayers collected in 2014 by Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue to estimate a binary probit regression model. Our results are generally in line with the findings of the modern empirical literature on tax morale in other countries. Overall, groups with lower labor force participation show more positive attitudes toward tax compliance. Educated respondents exhibit higher tax morale than the illiterate, but only for those with very low or very high educational attainment is tax morale higher than for those with bachelor’s degrees. Tax morale is highest in major industrialized population centers that serve as seats of government. Females show generally higher tax morale than males, however, their attitudes tend to worsen with age to such an extent that elderly females have lower tax morale than elderly males. Our findings on gender suggest potential gains from increasing female labor force participation rates. More generally, addressing the current failures of tax administration and dealing with horizontal inequity arising from administrative weaknesses may contribute materially to improving voluntary compliance.     

Engaging Australian small-scale lifestyle landowners in natural resource management programmes – Perceptions,past experiences and policy implications

This study explores Australian small-scale rural lifestyle landowners’ perceptions of and experiences with natural resource management (NRM) extension and incentive programmes and discusses means to better-match such programmes to these landowners’ NRM interests, assistance needs and delivery preferences. Data was collected from seventeen in-depth qualitative case-studies of small-acreage landholders located in the Noosa hinterland in south-east Queensland. These landholders indicated a high need for expert advice, labour and other resource assistance to achieve their property management objectives. They had, however, a low-level of awareness and understanding of available programmes (particularly incentive schemes) that could provide some of their needed support. Other key barriers to the landholders’ participation in these programmes were aversions to support providers, a perceived unsuitability of properties or irrelevance of particular incentive programmes, and concerns about programme application procedures or property-rights and value-related implications of engagement. Increased NRM engagement among small-scale lifestyle landowners may be achievable through amendments to existing support programmes and better communication of these programmes. The design and delivery of appropriate measures and messages may require collaborative partnerships, with knowledgeable and influential ‘go-to’ landowners and peer-mentoring networks playing a critical role. In many cases, conservation-focused incentive programmes may need to facilitate cooperative NRM among groups of adjoining micro-scale lifestyle landowners and allow greater flexibility in the length and allowable land and forest management practices of contractual agreements. Moreover, small-scale lifestyle landowners have much interest in and need for support to integrate multi-purpose agroforestry systems with other environmental and aesthetic property management goals. Workshops, follow-up field-days on participating properties, free one-on-one on-property advice, and NRM guides that include detailed case-study accounts of landowner experiences are important means of communicating the availability, administrative requirements and benefits of support programmes to small-scale lifestyle landowners.     

Tax collection,the informal sector,and productivity

An important determinant of informality in a country is its tax enforcement capacity, which some authors argue further distorts the decisions of firms and creates inefficiency. In this paper, I assess the quantitative effect of incomplete tax enforcement on aggregate output and productivity using a dynamic general equilibrium framework. I calibrate the model using data for Mexico, where the informal sector is large. I then investigate the effects of improving enforcement. I find that under complete enforcement, Mexico's labor productivity and output would be 19% higher under perfect competition and 34% higher under monopolistic competition. The source of this gain is the removal of the distortions induced by incomplete enforcement of taxes. These distortions affect the economy in three ways: by reducing the capital–labor ratios of informal establishments; by allowing low-productive entrepreneurs to enter; and by misallocating resources towards low-productive establishments. As a result, TFP and capital accumulation are reduced, and hence output. I decompose the gains following the guidelines of five leading papers in the literature of resource misallocation across plants. I isolate the effects of pure factor misallocation, distorted occupational choices, capital accumulation, and complementarities. I also study marginal improvements in enforcement and find that there is an inverted-U relationship between the size of the informal sector and output. This reflects the fact that improving enforcement entails a tradeoff: more taxes vs. fewer distortions.     

Truthful germs are contagious: A local-to-global characterization of truthfulness

We study the question of which social choice functions from an abstract type space to a set of outcomes are truthful, i.e., implementable by truthful mechanisms, when utilities are quasi-linear. For convex domains, our main theorem characterizes truthful social choice functions as those satisfying two properties: local weak monotonicity and vortex-freeness. The first of these constrains the function values at any two sufficiently proximal points, while the second asserts that its line integrals around sufficiently small triangular loops must vanish.The characterization implies a local-to-global principle that allows one to deduce truthfulness of a function from its behavior on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of each point. Other consequences include a simple alternate derivation of the Saks–Yu Theorem that weak monotonicity characterizes truthfulness of functions having a convex domain and finite range, and a sufficient condition for constructing truthful functions by “stitching together” truthful subfunctions on different subsets of the domain.