Jeffrey L. Hoopes

Public Pressure and Corporate Tax Behavior

We use a shock to the public scrutiny of firm subsidiary locations to investigate whether that scrutiny leads to changes in firms’ disclosure and corporate tax avoidance behavior. ActionAid International, a non-profit activist group, levied public pressure on noncompliant U.K. firms in the FTSE 100 to comply with a rule requiring U.K. firms to disclose the location of all of their subsidiaries. We use this setting to examine whether the public pressure led scrutinized firms to increase their subsidiary disclosure, decrease tax avoidance, and reduce the use of subsidiaries in tax haven countries compared to other firms in the FTSE 100 not affected by the public pressure. The evidence suggests that the public scrutiny sufficiently changed the costs and benefits of tax avoidance such that tax expense increased for scrutinized firms. The results suggest that public pressure from outside activist groups can exert a significant influence on the behavior of large publicly-traded firms. Our findings extend prior research that has had little success documenting an empirical relation between public scrutiny of tax avoidance and firm behavior.

What Do Firms Do When Dividend Tax Rates Change? An Examination of Alternative Payout Responses

This paper investigates whether investor-level taxes affect corporate payout policy decisions. We predict and find a surge of special dividends in the final months of 2010 and 2012, immediately before individual-level dividend tax rates were expected to increase. We also find evidence that immediately before the expected tax increases, firms altered the timing of their regular dividend payments by shifting what would normally be January regular dividend payments into the preceding December. To our knowledge this is the first evidence in the literature about changes in the timing of regular dividend payments in response to tax law changes. For both actions (specials and shifting), we find that it was more likely for a firm to respond to individual-level tax rates if insiders owned a relatively large amount of the firm. Overall, our paper provides evidence that managers consider individual-level taxes in making corporate payout decisions.

The Effect of Public Disclosure on Reported Taxable Income: Evidence from Individuals and Corporations in Japan

The behavioral response to public disclosure of income tax returns figures prominently in policy debates about its advisability. Although supporters stress that disclosure encourages tax compliance, policy debates proceed in the absence of empirical evidence about this, and any other, claimed behavioral impact. This paper provides the first such evidence by examining the behavioral response to the Japanese tax return public notification system. The analysis suggests that, when there is a threshold for disclosure, a non-trivial number of both individual and corporate taxpayers whose tax liability would otherwise be close to the threshold will under-report so as to avoid disclosure — a response in the opposite direction from that stressed by supporters of disclosure. An analysis of corporations’ financial data offers no evidence that these companies’ taxable income declined after the end of the disclosure system.

Public Pressure and Corporate Tax Behavior: PUBLIC PRESSURE AND CORPORATE TAX BEHAVIOR

We use a shock to the public scrutiny of firm subsidiary locations to investigate whether that scrutiny leads to changes in firms’ disclosure and corporate tax avoidance behavior. ActionAid International, a nonprofit activist group, levied public pressure on noncompliant U.K. firms in the FTSE 100 to comply with a rule requiring U.K. firms to disclose the location of all of their subsidiaries. We use this setting to examine whether the public pressure led scrutinized firms to increase their subsidiary disclosure, decrease tax avoidance, and reduce the use of subsidiaries in tax haven countries compared to other firms in the FTSE 100 not affected by the public pressure. The evidence suggests that the public scrutiny sufficiently changed the costs and benefits of tax avoidance such that tax expense increased for scrutinized firms. The results suggest that public pressure from outside activist groups can exert a significant influence on the behavior of large, publicly traded firms. Our findings extend prior research that has had little success documenting an empirical relation between public scrutiny of tax avoidance and firm behavior.

Does Use Tax Evasion Provide a Competitive Advantage to E-tailers?

Many online retail firms (e-tailers) do not collect sales tax from the majority of their customers. This practice provides these firms with a potential competitive advantage over traditional retailers. We examine stock market returns and analysts’ sales forecast revisions surrounding federal legislative proposals, such as the Marketplace Fairness Act, that could erode this alleged competitive advantage for e-tailers. Following events that indicated an increased likelihood of federal sales tax legislation, we find negative abnormal stock returns for e-tail firms relative to traditional retail firms. We also find that analysts forecast a future reduction in sales revenue for e-tailers. These findings imply the existence of a competitive advantage for e-tailers that will potentially diminish with the enactment of federal sales tax legislation.

Strategic Subsidiary Disclosure

We use data multinational firms provide to the Internal Revenue Service regarding their foreign subsidiary locations to explore whether some firms fail to publicly disclose subsidiaries in some countries, even when the subsidiaries are significant and should be disclosed per Security and Exchange Commission rules. The propensity to omit significant subsidiaries is especially strong when subsidiaries are in tax havens and when the firm is more highly scrutinized by the media, suggesting firms believe there are reputational costs associated with operations in tax havens. Additionally, we find evidence that firms omitting significant subsidiaries are more likely to misstate their financial results and are more likely to receive an SEC comment letter as compared to firms that do not omit significant subsidiaries. These results suggest that subsidiary omission may be indicative of firms’ broader disclosure and accounting choices.

The Effect of Temporary Tax Laws on Understanding and Predicting Corporate Earnings

This paper investigates the extent to which expirations of a temporary tax law reduce the ability of market participants to predict and understand corporate earnings. Examining evidence from eight separate expirations of the R&D tax credit, I find that analysts’ forecast errors, abnormal bid-ask spreads and abnormal volume increase surrounding quarterly earnings announcements for firms that are affected by the R&D tax credit. These increases suggest difficulties in interpreting earnings that are affected by the expired R&D tax credit. Further, I find that analyst revisions just following extensions of the R&D tax credit are relatively less accurate than other revisions. The results of this study call attention to previously unexplored costs of temporary tax laws, namely, capital market confusion related to corporate earnings affected by expired tax laws.

Public Tax-Return Disclosure

We investigate the consequences of public disclosure of information from company income tax returns filed in Australia. Supporters of more disclosure argue that increased transparency will improve tax compliance, while opponents argue that it will divulge sensitive information that is, in many cases, misunderstood. Our results show that in Australia large private companies experienced some consumer backlash and, perhaps partly in anticipation, some acted to avoid disclosure. We detect a small increase (decrease) in tax payments for private (public) firms subject to disclosure suggesting differential costs of disclosure across firms. Finally, we find that investors react negatively to anticipated and actual disclosure of tax information, most likely due to anticipated policy backlash rather than consumer backlash or the revelation of negative information about cash flows. These findings are important for both managers and policy makers, as the trend towards increased tax disclosure continues to rise globally.

Is the Market Grossed out by Gross-Ups? An Investigation of Firms that Pay Their CEOs' Taxes

This study provides evidence on whether investors value tax gross-up provisions for executives, and how the elimination of these provisions changes executive compensation. We examine the market response to tax gross-up eliminations and find investors react favorably to the removal of these provisions, suggesting that on average, investors perceived these agreements as a bad compensation practice that destroyed firm value. Next, we examine whether firms respond to these eliminations by increasing other forms of executive compensation. We find firms eliminating tax gross-up provisions increase bonus but not salary. Broadly, we provide evidence that some features of compensation contracts are not valued by shareholders, and that the elimination of these features can lead to increased firm value.

Shareholder Wealth Effects of Border Adjustment Taxation

Abstract Following 2 decades of discussion, the border adjustment tax (BAT) briefly emerged as part of proposed US corporate tax reform in early 2017. While heavily debated, little empirical evidence exists regarding the BAT. We take advantage of the period during which the BAT was under strong consideration to examine its effects on shareholder value. We find that high-importing firms (measured using industry, aggregate government industry data, and firm-level shipping-container data) suffer negative returns on days the tax had a greater likelihood of adoption. We also find that firms lobbying for the BAT experience positive returns over that same time period.