Accounting Review
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Taxes and Peer Effects ABSTRACT
A growing literature examines how a firm's behavior impacts the behavior of its peers. In this paper, we examine how changes in tax paying, and the associated financial reporting, impact a firm's peers. Changes to tax paying and reporting behavior at other firms within a peer group can be affected by many of the same factors, such as industry-level tax policy changes or audit risk, so we make use of exogenous—to the peer firms—shocks to tax behavior. Following the methodology of Dyreng, Hanlon, and Maydew (2010), we estimate managerial tax avoidance fixed effects and use these to identify tax rate shocks associated with executive turnover. We find that peer firms respond to these shocks by changing their GAAP tax rates in the same direction. The magnitude of the effect corresponds to an approximately 10 percent response to the average change in peer group GAAP ETR. Our evidence suggests that these peer effects occur only for book (i.e., financial reporting), rather than cash (i.e., real effects), ETR and are concentrated in firms with potentially greater discretion in reporting taxes on foreign earnings.
JEL Classifications: H25; M41.
Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from public sources identified in the paper.
Accounting Review - Tập 93 Số 5 - Trang 97-117 - 2018
Long-Run Corporate Tax Avoidance We develop and describe a new measure of long-run corporate tax avoidance that is based on the ability to pay a low amount of cash taxes per dollar of pre-tax earnings over long time periods. We label this measure the “long-run cash effective tax rate.” We use the long-run cash effective tax rate to examine (1) the extent to which some firms are able to avoid taxes over periods as long as ten years, and (2) how predictive one-year tax rates are for long-run tax avoidance. In our sample of 2,077 firms, we find there is considerable cross-sectional variation in tax avoidance. For example, approximately one-fourth of our sample firms are able to maintain long-run cash effective tax rates below 20 percent, compared to a sample mean tax rate of approximately 30 percent. We also find that annual cash effective tax rates are not very good predictors of long-run cash effective tax rates and, thus, are not accurate proxies for long-run tax avoidance. While there is some evidence of persistence in annual cash effective tax rates, the persistence is asymmetric. Low annual cash effective tax rates are more persistent than are high annual cash effective tax rates. An initial examination of characteristics of firms successful at keeping their cash effective tax rates low over long periods shows that they are well spread across industries but with some clustering.
Accounting Review - Tập 83 Số 1 - Trang 61-82 - 2008
Incentives for Tax Planning and Avoidance: Evidence from the Field ABSTRACT
We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 corporate tax executives to investigate firms' incentives and disincentives for tax planning. While many researchers hypothesize that reputational concerns affect the degree to which managers engage in tax planning, this hypothesis is difficult to test with archival data. Our survey allows us to investigate reputational influences and, indeed, we find that reputational concerns are important—69 percent of executives rate reputation as important and the factor ranks second in order of importance among all factors explaining why firms do not adopt a potential tax planning strategy. We also find that financial accounting incentives play a role. For example, 84 percent of publicly traded firms respond that top management at their company cares at least as much about the GAAP ETR as they do about cash taxes paid and 57 percent of public firms say that increasing earnings per share is an important outcome from a tax planning strategy.
JEL Classifications: D83; G31, M41.
Data Availability: Survey responses are confidential. Other data are available from public sources identified in the paper.
Accounting Review - Tập 89 Số 3 - Trang 991-1023 - 2014
The Spread of Aggressive Corporate Tax Reporting: A Detailed Examination of the Corporate-Owned Life Insurance Shelter ABSTRACT: This study investigates the spread of aggressive corporate tax reporting by modeling a firm’s decision to adopt the corporate-owned life insurance (COLI) shelter. Prior studies identify firm characteristics associated with aggressive tax reporting (Desai and Dharmapala 2006; Frank et al. 2009) and tax shelter participation (Wilson 2009; Lisowsky 2010). This study examines whether social environment factors explain the pattern of tax shelter adoption. Building on theory related to the diffusion of innovations and institutional isomorphism, I hypothesize direct and indirect ties between prior and potential shelter adopters influence the spread of shelter use. I find that network ties via board interlocks increase the likelihood of adopting the COLI shelter. I also find weak evidence that COLI use spreads geographically. However, I find no evidence that the spread of COLI use is concentrated among a particular set of audit firms or industries.
Accounting Review - Tập 86 Số 1 - Trang 23-57 - 2011
Network Ties Among Low-Tax Firms ABSTRACT
This study examines (1) whether network ties help explain variation in tax avoidance, and (2) how the relation between network ties and tax avoidance varies depending on the nature and context of those ties. We posit that information on a range of tax-avoidance strategies is shared among firms through their social network connections. Using board interlocks to proxy for these connections, we find that firms with greater board ties to low-tax firms have lower cash ETRs themselves. Ties to low-tax firms are more influential when the focal firm and its network partner are operationally and strategically similar, as are ties created by executive directors. Board ties to low-tax firms are also more influential when the focal firm and its network partner engage the same local auditor. Overall, our results suggest that the influence of firms' network ties on their tax-avoidance behavior depends on the character of those ties.
Accounting Review - Tập 89 Số 2 - Trang 483-510 - 2014
Investor Relations, Firm Visibility, and Investor Following ABSTRACT
We examine the actions and outcomes of investor relations (IR) programs in smaller, less-visible firms. Through interviews with IR professionals, we learn that IR strategies have a common goal of attracting institutional investors and that direct access to management, rather than increased disclosure, is viewed as the key driver of the strategy's success. We test for the effects of IR programs by examining small-cap companies that hired IR firms in a differences-in-differences research design with controls for changes in disclosure and determinants of the decision to initiate IR. Relative to a matched sample of control firms, we find that companies initiating IR programs exhibit greater increases in institutional investor ownership and a shift toward investors that normally would not follow the companies. We also find greater improvements in analyst following, media coverage, and the book-to-price ratio. Our results indicate that IR activities successfully improve visibility, investor following, and market value.
Data Availability: All analyses are based on publicly available data.
Accounting Review - Tập 87 Số 3 - Trang 867-897 - 2012
Product Market Competition and Managerial Disclosure of Earnings Forecasts: Evidence from Import Tariff Rate Reductions ABSTRACT
This study examines the effect of product market competition on managerial disclosure of earnings forecasts using large reductions in U.S. import tariff rates to identify an exogenous increase in competition for domestic firms in U.S. product markets. Our difference-in-differences estimations show that tariff reductions are associated with a significant decrease in management forecasts of annual earnings by U.S. domestic firms. Further, this decrease is more pronounced when the tariff rate reduction triggers a greater increase in imports and when the forecasts are likely to incur higher proprietary costs. Our findings are consistent with competition from existing rivals reducing voluntary disclosure through increased proprietary costs.
Accounting Review - Tập 92 Số 3 - Trang 185-207 - 2017
Mandatory Financial Reporting and Voluntary Disclosure: The Effect of Mandatory IFRS Adoption on Management Forecasts ABSTRACT
This study examines the effect of the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on voluntary disclosure. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we document a significant increase in the likelihood and frequency of management earnings forecasts following mandatory IFRS adoption, consistent with the notion that IFRS adoption alters firms' disclosure incentives in response to increased capital-market demand. We find the increase to be larger among firms domiciled in code-law countries, suggesting a catching-up effect among firms facing low disclosure incentives pre-adoption. We then propose and test three channels through which IFRS adoption could alter firms' disclosure incentives: improved earnings quality, increased shareholder demand, and increased analyst demand. We find evidence consistent with all three channels.
Accounting Review - Tập 91 Số 3 - Trang 933-953 - 2016
The Media and Mispricing: The Role of the Business Press in the Pricing of Accounting Information ABSTRACT
This study investigates the role of the business press in the pricing of accounting information. Using a comprehensive dataset of more than 111,000 earnings-related business press articles published from 2000 to 2010, we find that press coverage of the annual earnings announcement mitigates cash flow mispricing, but has a negligible effect on accrual mispricing. We provide evidence that this impact is driven primarily by the press disseminating the information more broadly, rather than by the creation of new content that helps investors understand the implications of accounting information. Our results suggest that the business press plays an important role in facilitating the market's ability to efficiently impound accounting information into stock prices and provide new insights into the role of the business press as an information intermediary in capital markets.
Accounting Review - Tập 89 Số 5 - Trang 1673-1701 - 2014
Spreading the Word: Price Discovery and Newswire Dissemination of Management Earnings Guidance ABSTRACT
This study investigates the impact of dissemination on the efficiency of the price discovery process with respect to management earnings guidance disclosures. I first identify firm and guidance characteristics associated with the likelihood that guidance receives coverage in the Dow Jones Newswires. Using propensity score, within-firm, and returns-based matched control samples of guidance, I find that newswire dissemination is associated with larger initial price reactions and, more importantly, an increase in the speed with which guidance information is incorporated into price. I also find that newswire coverage affects the market's reaction to stand-alone versus bundled guidance and good versus bad news guidance. This study is the first to provide evidence of systematic variation, both across and within firms, in the breadth of guidance dissemination, and it shows that this variation has a substantial effect on how investors respond to guidance.
JEL Classifications: G14; M41; L82.
Accounting Review - Tập 91 Số 1 - Trang 317-346 - 2016
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