Scott D. Dyreng

The Effects of Executives on Corporate Tax Avoidance

This paper investigates whether individual top executives have incremental effects on their firms’ tax avoidance that cannot be explained by characteristics of the firm. To identify executive effects on firms’ effective tax rates, we construct a dataset that tracks the movement of 908 executives across firms over time. The results indicate that individual executives play a significant role in determining the level of tax avoidance that firms undertake. The economic magnitude of the executive effects on tax avoidance is large. Moving between the top and bottom quartiles of executives results in approximately an eleven percent swing in GAAP effective tax rates; thus, executive effects appear to be an important determinant in firms’ tax avoidance.

Using Financial Accounting Data to Examine the Effect of Foreign Operations Located in Tax Havens and Other Countries on U.S. Multinational Firms' Tax Rates

This paper investigates the effect tax havens and other foreign jurisdictions have on the income tax rates of multinational firms based in the United States. We develop a new regression methodology using financial accounting data to estimate the average worldwide, federal, and foreign tax rates on worldwide, federal, and foreign pre-tax income for a large sample of US firms with and without tax haven operations. We find that on average US firms that disclosed material operations in at least one tax haven country have a worldwide tax burden on worldwide income that is approximately 1.5 percentage points lower than firms without operations in at least one tax haven country. Our results also show that US firms face a 4.4 percent current federal tax rate on foreign income whether or not they have tax haven operations. Finally, we find that US firms with operations in some tax haven countries have higher federal tax rates on foreign income than other firms. This result suggests that in some cases, tax haven operations may increase US tax collections at the expense of foreign country tax collections.

Religious Social Norms and Corporate Financial Reporting

Religion has been shown to influence economic choices and outcomes in a variety of contexts. Honesty and risk aversion are two social norms forwarded to characterize the religious. Using the level of religious adherence in the county of a U.S. firm’s headquarters as a proxy for these religious social norms, we find that higher levels of religious adherence are associated with both a lower likelihood of financial restatement and less risk that financial statements are misrepresented because of overstated (understated) revenue/assets (expenses/liabilities). We also find that accruals of managers in areas of high religious adherence exhibit smaller deviations from expectations, and deviations, when they occur, tend to improve the time series mapping of accruals into cash flows. These results hold overall and separately for both Catholic and Protestant religious adherence. Further analysis reveals that the effects of religious social norms extend beyond accrual choices. We find that firms located in areas of high religious adherence are less likely to engage in tax sheltering, and are more forthcoming with bad news in their voluntary disclosures. Collectively, our results provide new evidence on the role of religion and social norms in corporate financial reporting.

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.

Where do firms manage earnings

Despite decades of research on how, why, and when companies manage earnings, there is a paucity of evidence about the geographic location of earnings management within multinational firms. In this study, we examine where companies manage earnings using a sample of 2,067 U.S. multinational firms from 1994 to 2009. We predict and find that firms with extensive foreign operations in weak rule of law countries have more foreign earnings management than companies with subsidiaries in locations where the rule of law is strong. We also find some evidence that profitable firms with extensive tax haven subsidiaries manage earnings more than other firms and that the earnings management is concentrated in foreign income. Apart from these results, we find that most earnings management takes place in domestic income, not foreign income.

Changes in Corporate Effective Tax Rates Over the Past Twenty-Five Years

We investigate systematic changes in corporate effective tax rates over the past 25 years and find that effective tax rates have decreased significantly. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the decline in effective tax rates is not concentrated in multinational firms; effective tax rates have declined at approximately the same rate for both multinational and domestic firms. Moreover, we find that within multinational firms, both foreign and domestic effective rates have decreased. Finally, we find that changes in firm characteristics and declining foreign statutory tax rates explain little of the overall decrease in effective rates. The findings have broad implications for research, as well as for current policy debates about reforming the corporate income tax.

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.

Where Do Firms Manage Earnings

Despite decades of research on how, why, and when companies manage earnings, there is a paucity of evidence about the geographic location of earnings management within multinational firms. In this study, we examine where companies manage earnings using a sample of 2,067 U.S. multinational firms from 1994 to 2009. We predict and find that firms with extensive foreign operations in weak rule of law countries have more foreign earnings management than companies with subsidiaries in locations where the rule of law is strong. We also find some evidence that profitable firms with extensive tax haven subsidiaries manage earnings more than other firms and that the earnings management is concentrated in foreign income. Apart from these results, we find that most earnings management takes place in domestic income, not foreign income.

The Effect of Financial Constraints on Tax-Motivated Income Shifting by U.S. Multinationals

When a U.S. multinational corporation shifts income from the U.S. to foreign jurisdictions, it incurs costs and reaps benefits. The benefits may be reduced if the shifted income must be returned to the U.S. as a dividend in the short term and face the same U.S. tax it would have if the income had not been shifted. Firms, then, have incentive to defer repatriation of earnings and to fund domestic cash needs with external financing. The cost of external financing, however, is increasing in financial constraints, leading to the prediction that constrained firms will be unable to defer repatriation and, therefore, will reap no benefits from shifting. Consistent with this prediction, we find that financially constrained firms shift less income from the U.S. to foreign countries than their unconstrained peers. We estimate that financially constrained firms shift out 20% less of pre-shifted income than unconstrained firms. Translating this percentage to dollar values, the mean (median) constrained firm shifts

Rolling the Dice: When Does Tax Avoidance Result in Tax Uncertainty?

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