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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between aggressive tax planning and stock price synchronicity.

Employing the special institutional background of China, this study constructs tax aggressiveness and stock price synchronicity measures for a large sample of Chinese stocks spanning the period 2003–2015. The authors employ OLS regression as the baseline methodology, and a fixed effect model, the Fama–Macbeth method and GMM as sensitivity checks. Matched samples and difference-in-difference analyses are used to control for endogeneity.

The authors find a significant and positive association between aggressive tax planning and stock price synchronicity. Because material information about risky tax transactions tends to be hidden in various tax accruals accounts, aggressive tax strategies make financial statements less transparent, thereby, increasing information asymmetry and decreasing stock price informativeness. The authors also find that the firms engaging in aggressive tax planning exhibit relatively high corporate opacity. In addition, the authors find that improvements in the tax enforcement regime, ownership status and high-quality auditors all constrain the adverse effects of tax aggressiveness.

This study has important practical implications for China’s regulators, who are striving to reduce the tax burden of enterprises. It also helps investors to consider investment decisions more appropriately from a taxation perspective.

First, this paper contributes to the stock price efficiency literature by identifying the effect of a hitherto unexamined factor, namely, firm-level aggressive tax planning, on the efficiency of stock prices. Second, this study provides further empirical evidence to support the agency view of tax aggressiveness, and the informational interpretation of stock price synchronicity. Third, this study helps us better understand the effects of firm-level tax policy on firm-specific information capitalization in an environment where overall country-level investor protection is relatively weak.

This paper aims to address the fundamentals of tax planning and seeks to focus on the opportunities and root causes for tax planning.

The paper reviews the current state of tax planning with case studies that reveal fundamental statutory structural opportunities.

While some, possibly many, tax advisers lack integrity and recommend tax structures to their clients that are inconsistent with reasonable interpretations of the tax law, most advisers, even very aggressive and creative advisers, probably do not. The paper suggests that it may be futile to seek to deter tax professionals from designing and marketing tax plans unless legislation makes tax advisers jointly responsible with their clients for their clients’ tax underpayments.

Short of such a radical approach, governments must commit first to altering the basic structure of their tax laws to make aggressive tax planning uninviting.

The paper offers original insights into the inseparability of the legislative process from the creation of unnecessary tax planning opportunities.

This paper examines the relationship between tax avoidance and accounting comparability. The authors argue that aggressive tax behavior impairs the comparability of financial statements by altering the accounting function, which maps economic events into accounting data.

The empirical analysis is based on a large sample of United States (US) firms. The authors use raw and industry-adjusted effective tax rates (ETRs) to proxy tax avoidance. The authors use the measure of accounting comparability developed by De Franco et al. (2011), which aims to capture the similarity of the accounting function.

The authors find that firms with more aggressive tax avoidance strategies have substantially lower accounting comparability. The evidence also shows that the negative effect of tax avoidance on accounting comparability is driven by firms with aggressive tax planning strategies beyond the industry norm. Furthermore, using an alternative measure of accounting comparability as a function of pre-tax income, the authors continue to find evidence of the negative effect of tax avoidance behavior. Importantly, this provides evidence that the effect of aggressive tax planning is not limited to the reported tax expense, but affects the comparability of the overall financial reporting system.

The authors identify a new potential cost of tax aggressive activities, being the loss of accounting comparability as driven by tax aggressive activities. The results contribute to the literature on the costs of tax avoidance and on the determinants of accounting comparability.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationships between company business strategy type and tax aggressiveness for companies listed on the Brazilian Bovespa stock exchange.

Following the concepts of Miles and Snow (1978, 2003), we classified company strategies into four types, analyser, defender, prospector and reactor, using data from 2012 to 2016. The authors excluded financial companies due to a differential tax regime. Next, prospector and defender companies were identified, and the relationship of these strategies with tax aggressiveness assessed using regression analysis; analyser and reactor types were not included as these are defined as a combination of the prospector and defender type, or non-strategic, respectively. To assess aggressiveness, the authors used effective tax rates on corporate profits, as well as a metric that captures tax burden in terms of all taxes paid by a company.

Most Brazilian companies were analysers (76.66 per cent), with prospector companies being a minority, and defenders representing a little over 21 per cent. Unlike the findings of Higgins et al. (2015), the authors found that defender companies also have a tendency to practice aggressive tax planning.

The authors found the Brazilian defender companies similar to prospectors, tended to be more tax aggressive or to take higher tax risks. Thus, findings in economies such as the USA may not be generalizable to other countries, such as Brazil, Russia, India or China (i.e. the BRICs), for example. The particularities of each country, such as ease of access to the capital market, tax deductibility of investment in research and development and legal issues must be considered before applying generalized prognostics.

This paper offers original empirical evidence from Brazil of the relationship between company strategy type and the tax aggressiveness, offering a clear result that differs in part from results from American companies. It therefore encourages further studies on this topic.

This paper aims to understand the international practices of tax planning. International companies choose their capital structure according to differences in international taxation, in order to minimize the tax burden of the whole company group. This paper reviews the literature that deals with international tax avoidance techniques by highlighting tax planning measurements in the empirical literature. The methodology used is the narrative approach of literature review, which consists on assembling and synthesizing previously published research. The paper concludes that there are several approaches of international tax planning including transfers of revenues by geographical area, redevelopment of the company, haven and loopholes in tax legislation. Moreover, finding more precise measures of tax planning techniques would be of great value to studies in this respect.

The authors follow the guideline provided by Templier and Pare (2015) in order to select the type of the literature review to use in this paper. Accordingly, this paper employs the narrative approach of literature review, which consists on assembling and synthesizing previously published research on international tax planning. This narrative review will serve as a starting point for future investigations and research developments. The authors rely on a logic of configuration in order to analyze data. This logic consists on addressing then organizing various aspects of international practices of tax planning.

The paper concludes that there are many aspects of international tax planning that need to be covered by future researchers, especially finding more precise measures of tax planning techniques would be of great value to studies in this respect.

The literature survey reveals the following issues. First, few studies have been conducted to date. Second, several approaches remain unexplored, and studies rely only on surveys' results collected from the annual report of companies (microeconomics variables), while macroeconomic variables can better explain the phenomenon of international tax planning. In this context, studies containing proposals to estimate more accurate international companies' tax planning techniques would also be welcome. Previous literature supposes premises on this issue th:at limit the accurateness of the analysis. Particularly, empirical literature is short of the proper measurement to evaluate corporate tax avoidance. This would explain the various interpretations of research findings. Hence, finding more precise measures of tax planning techniques would be of great value to studies in this respect.

This literature survey highlights recent studies dealing with tax planning theories within the framework of corporate governance. This theoretical framework particularly specifies which key variables are the most suitable for measuring tax planning methods and highlights the need to examine how those key variables might differ and under what circumstances. In addition, it underlines limits on tax planning measurements by addressing the comparison of the empirical measurements.

The paper contributes to the literature on internal tax planning in several ways. First, this study is unique in that it constitutes the only literature review that provides a comprehensive overview of research on international tax planning. Especially, it extends previous studies by considering the specific new trend of empirical literature dealing with the techniques of international tax planning. This literature review identifies two categories of tax planning approaches including techniques related to company internal management practices and international tax planning techniques. In addition, the literature survey helps to determine various strategies used by multinationals for tax planning, through an in-depth review of the existing studies. Finally, it provides researchers with a starting point to further explore issues related to tax avoidance techniques.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between a company’s use of aggressive tax planning and several audit committee members’ characteristics, namely, independence, expertise, diligence and gender diversity.

This paper is an empirical research using archival data from 289 Canadian listed companies for the 2011-2015 period.

The authors find that measures of expertise and diligence are significantly related to tax aggressiveness. Financial expertise and tenure on the audit committee play an important role in constraining tax aggressiveness, as does having a larger audit committee.

One limitation – and an area for future research – is that the effects of the audit committee members’ relationships with managers of the firms were not investigated.

Knowledge of audit committee characteristics may send a signal to shareholders, investors and tax agencies regarding the company’s potential risk with respect to aggressive tax planning. The analysis provides useful insights for board governance committees when determining the profile of persons to nominate for board positions and committees. In discussing tax-risk management, the study may heighten audit committee members’ awareness of their role in this respect.

This study’s results indicate that even in a setting where incentives for firms to be tax-aggressive is low compared to high-tax rate countries, there is variability in firms’ tax aggressiveness. This situation allows us to find audit committee characteristics that are effective in decreasing tax aggressiveness.

The purpose of this research is to determine whether the type of tax services provided by a public accounting firm to its audit client and the consequence severity of an audit failure impact jurors' assessment of audit quality and auditor liability.

The authors administer a court case to 168 jurors manipulating three levels of tax services provided to an audit client (none, tax preparation, and aggressive tax planning services); two levels of consequence severity of the alleged audit failure, observing the impact on jurors' assessment of audit quality, auditor responsibility for audit failure; and damages awarded the plaintiff.

Consistent with recent US regulations, jurors perceive the quality of the audit to be lower when auditors provide aggressive tax planning services, but not for tax preparation services. Damages are greater when auditors provide aggressive tax planning services across both levels of consequence severity.

The results indicate that the type of tax services provided may impact jurors' views of audit quality and damage assessments against auditors. The questionnaire uses previously validated measures, but the results may not be generalizable to jurors in all jurisdictions.

Though empirical evidence is mixed at best about the impact of auditors providing non-audit services on auditor independence in fact, auditor independence in appearance, and thus audit quality, such impacts may affect the way jurors perceive the situation.

The study directly tests the implications for auditor liability of new restrictions on tax services and more accurately measures the impact of consequence severity, using actual jurors.

The existing literature documents mixed evidence toward the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate tax planning (e.g., Davis, Guenther, Krull, & Williams, 2016; Hoi, Wu, & Zhang, 2013). In this study, I aim to identify a causal relationship between CSR and tax planning, leveraging the staggered adoptions of constituency statutes in US states, which is a plausibly exogenous shock to firms' emphasis on their social responsibility. In general, the statutes permit firm directors to consider the interests of all constituents when making business decisions, including those who benefit from firms paying their fair share of income taxes. Thus, the adoption of the statutes raises the importance of firms' social responsibility in paying income taxes. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) method, I find that firms incorporated in states that have adopted constituency statutes exhibit significantly higher effective tax rates (ETRs) based on current tax expense. This causal relationship suggests that managers, with the legitimacy to consider the social impact of tax avoidance, become less aggressive in tax planning. I further find that the effect of adoption is stronger for financially unconstrained firms and firms in retail businesses, where the demand (cost) for tax avoidance is lower (higher). Finally, I show that my main results are driven by firms located in states with a high sense of social responsibility and firms with high levels of tax avoidance prior to the adoption. Overall, the findings in this chapter contribute to the literature by delineating a negative causal relationship between CSR and tax avoidance and identifying a positive social impact brought by the passage of constituency legislation.

Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), this study investigates how tax planning affects the likelihood of financial default in different stages of the corporate life cycle.

Collecting a large sample of US firms between 1989 and 2016, hypotheses are tested using a hazard model. Several robustness and endogeneity checks corroborate the main findings.

The results show that tax-planning firms are less likely to default in the introduction and decline stages, while they are more likely to default in the growth and maturity stages. The findings suggest that introductory and declining firms use cash resources obtained from tax planning efficiently to meet their needs and acquire other useful resources. In growing and mature firms, tax aggressiveness generates unnecessary slack resources, weakens managerial discipline and increases reputational risks.

The results shed light on the benefits and costs associated with tax planning throughout firms' life cycle, holding great significance for managers, investors, lenders and other stakeholders.

This study contributes to the literature that examines resource management at different life cycle stages by showing that cash resources from tax planning are managed in distinctive ways in each life cycle stage, having a varied impact on the likelihood of default. The authors shed light on underexplored cash resources. Furthermore, this study shows the potential linkages between the agency theory and RBV.

This study examines the impact of expanded geographical disclosures on nonprofessional investor judgments. Public country-by-country reporting (CBCR) is a way to increase corporate transparency, enhancing tax fairness and accountability (European Commission, 2016). Public disclosure would make large multinational companies share information about profits, taxes paid, and number of employees on a per-country basis. However, it is unclear whether nonprofessional investors would even use CBCR and how they would interpret the information. Adding to the policy debate on whether publicly available country-by-country information will be properly used, this study employs an experimental design to investigate the effect of disclosure availability and content on nonprofessional investor judgments. We find that participants receiving an expanded disclosure are able to more accurately assess the state of the social contract between the organization and society, imposing sanctions if necessary. Exploring CBCR provides timely evidence to regulators, standard setters, and tax fairness campaigners on the impact of expanded geographical disclosures as a means of increasing transparency and improving competitiveness.