Research

Taxation is a central economic policy tool, with governments increasingly using tax policy to stimulate local economic growth and also regulate multinational firms. We review the empirical literature that studies the effect of tax policies on firms' investment, employment, and other real outcomes. Building on the neoclassical theory of corporate taxes and tangible investment, we propose an organizing framework for our review that captures the wide set of tax policies and firm responses examined in accounting research. This framework highlights four dimensions along which accounting scholars contribute to the literature: (i) documenting the role of financial reporting incentives as a moderating factor in firms' real responses, (ii) studying firms' reporting versus real responses, (iii) quantifying real effects of tax disclosure regulations, and (iv) improving measurement of firms' tax status and proxies for investment and employment. We identify open questions for future research and suggest new international, federal, and local settings that may help uncover underlying mechanisms driving observed economic phenomena. Specifically, we encourage scholars to further distinguish firms' reported and real responses to tax changes and improve measurement of these outcomes, especially in settings related to environmental taxation or settings in which tax avoidance and real outcomes are closely linked.

Taxing companies' goods or services where they are consumed, rather than where companies operate, limits tax avoidance and improves efficiency. However, such destination-based systems are hard to enforce. Therefore, in the European Union, value-added taxes on digital business-to-consumer (B2C) sales were historically based on the seller's location or origin, allowing multinational companies to route sales through low-VAT countries. We study the impact of a 2015 reform that required multinationals to pay VAT where their consumers are. Difference-in-differences results suggest that they reported disproportionately high digital B2C services sales in low-VAT countries under the previous origin-based system. The introduction of the destination-based system curbed this tax planning behavior. While this baseline finding is consistent with expectations, we also provide novel evidence on potentially unintended or unexpected effects of system changes toward destination-based taxation. Specifically, we find that multinationals also decreased employment in low-VAT countries and increased income tax-motivated profit shifting post reform. In sum, our findings indicate that destination-based taxes curb corporate tax planning for mobile tax bases but that tax system changes have real effects and incentivize tax avoidance for other tax bases taxed at origin.

This paper investigates how tax loss carryforward (LCF) rules influence corporate bankruptcies and market-wide productivity. Analyzing data from 29 European countries, I find that stricter LCF deductibility limits significantly increase bankruptcy likelihoods. This is because stricter LCF deductibility limits lower the present value of net operating losses (NOLs) as tax assets, reducing the incentive to keep struggling firms alive. This effect is especially pronounced for business group firms, which can support struggling affiliates through internal capital markets to strategically exploit NOLs. My results suggest that lenient LCF deductibility limits can sustain unproductive firms, impacting market-wide resource allocation and productivity. These findings highlight the trade-off in tax policy between supporting firm survival and ensuring efficient resource allocation.

This paper offers the first systematic evidence on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures provided by a large global sample of private equity (PE) firms. Using historical websites from 2000 to 2022, we develop and validate a novel dictionary-based measure of voluntary PE firm ESG disclosures. Descriptive statistics reveal an increasing time trend in these disclosures, with social topics becoming as important as environmental topics recently. Multivariate analyses show that the demand for ESG information from fund investors is a significant determinant of PE firms' ESG disclosures. Leveraging data on PE firms' portfolio companies, we document that more PE firm ESG disclosures are associated with better ESG outcomes at the portfolio company level, suggesting that voluntary ESG disclosures align with real actions for the average PE firm.

We study the economic impact of private equity (PE) investments on local governments, which are important corporate stakeholders. Examining over 11,000 deals and private firm data in Europe, we document that target firms' effective tax rates and total tax expenses decrease by 15% and 13% after PE deals. At the same time, target firms expand their capital expenditures and firm boundaries, but do not increase employment. Using administrative data on the public finances of German municipalities and exploiting the geographical and time-series variation in PE deals, we document that PE activity is negatively associated with local governments' tax revenues and spending. This result is likely driven by reduced tax payments of PE portfolio firms, accompanied by only modest positive spillovers of PE investments on regional economic growth. Collectively, our findings suggest that corporate tax efficiency serves as a cost-cutting channel in the PE sector and constrains the finances of local governments.

Over 140 countries agreed on a fundamental corporate tax reform in 2021 to be implemented in 2023 and beyond. To measure its potential effects, we study asset price changes within minutes of the reform announcements. We construct proxies for the reform's costs regarding U.S. companies' tax burdens and countries' public finances. Likely exposed companies exhibit significant negative stock returns. Our lower-bound estimates indicate total shareholder value losses of $112.6 billion one day after the reform announcements. Further, likely exposed countries experience increases in sovereign debt credit risk. Our findings inform the cost-benefit analysis of a historical international tax reform.

We examine how exposure to international tax competition affects domestic firms' employment. Consistent with prior work, we find evidence that reductions in foreign tax rates affect the domestic competitive environment via increases in import competition and investment in foreign-owned firms. We posit that these changes in the competitive environment can cause managers to reduce their firms' employment levels. Consistent with our expectation, we find that relative decreases in foreign tax rates negatively affect total labor compensation at domestic firms ex ante exposed to import competition and competition from foreign-owned peers. The effect of exposure to tax competition is greater for firms more exposed to product market competition and those that are less able to expand investment without also increasing employment levels. Taken together, our results suggest that foreign tax rate changes can affect managers' domestic employment decisions by changing the domestic competitive environment.

We investigate the relationship between private firms' disclosures and the demand for the equity of their publicly traded peers. Using data on the global movement of portfolio investments in public equity, we find that a 10% increase in private firm disclosure transparency – proxied by the number of disclosed private firms' financial statement line items – reduces global investors' demand for public equity by 4.3% or $358 million per investee country-industry. These findings are consistent with private firm disclosures generating negative pecuniary externalities – global investors reallocate their capital away from public firms to more transparent private firms – and less consistent with these disclosures creating positive information externalities that would benefit public firms. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that the reduction in demand for public equity is offset by a comparable increase in capital allocation to more transparent private firms. Using a simulated instruments approach and the staggered implementations of electronic business registers in investee countries in Europe as plausibly exogenous shocks to private firm transparency, we conclude that the negative relationship between private firm disclosures and public equity demand is likely causal.

We investigate the effects of mandatory private Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) to European tax authorities on multinational firms' capital and labor investments, as well as their organizational structures. We exploit the threshold-based application of this 2016 disclosure rule to conduct difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity tests. We document increases in capital and labor expenditures in Europe, but these effects are more pronounced in countries with preferential tax regimes. Cross-sectional tests and analysis using consolidated financial data provide evidence consistent with multinational firms reallocating capital across Europe to mitigate increased tax enforcement risk, as well as with CbCR hindering capital investment efficiency. We also find evidence consistent with firms responding to CbCR by reducing organizational complexity. Collectively, our results support the conclusion that mandatory private CbCR causes firms to change real investment activities to substantiate their tax avoidance activities in Europe while reducing the appearance of aggressive tax practices.

Can private sector investment pledges meaningfully shift investor expectations following the enactment of pro-growth public policies? While policymakers often present such pledges as landmark signals of reform momentum, this paper provides the first empirical assessment of their credibility and impact. The setting is the July 2025 "Made for Germany" initiative, in which 61 firms joined the newly elected government to announce a €631 billion investment pledge—presumably in response to newly adopted tax incentives and public spending measures. The pledged amount appears ambitious but not implausible when benchmarked against the historical investment behavior of the committing firms. Capital markets initially responded favorably: publicly listed pledging firms experienced abnormal returns of 0.5 percent on the event day (€1.7 billion) and €3.1 billion over two days. Broader German equity indices and sovereign bond yields also rose relative to international benchmarks. These effects dissipated within days, suggesting that investment pledges may boost short-term investor sentiment but are unlikely to generate lasting economic impact without more tangible action.

We study how Russian oligarch-affiliated companies operate globally and respond to sanctions. We construct a dataset tracking 70 companies, 1,800 international subsidiaries, and their institutional investors between 2009 and 2023. These companies maintain extensive networks, especially in tax havens. Difference-in-differences estimates show that the 2014 and 2022 sanctions had limited impact on the companies' global footprint or access to institutional minority investors. Instead, oligarch companies use more tax haven entities, in particular in jurisdictions offering secrecy, and withdraw from jurisdictions with beneficial ownership disclosure regulation. Our findings highlight how organizational complexity and regulatory arbitrage undermine sanctions, suggesting that globally coordinated transparency regulation is critical for enforcement.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming businesses and the technological frontier, yet its cross-border spillovers remain understudied. Using a novel panel dataset, we find that AI investment strongly propagates internationally in the form of growth in foreign subsidiaries' assets, employment, and revenues. We construct a measure of European country-industry exposure to U.S. firms' AI investments and document significant spillovers of U.S.-originating AI investment into European industries. However, these effects vary with local tax policies: European countries with attractive R&D tax incentives experience faster, larger AI-driven growth, while low corporate tax rates further amplify revenue spillovers. To test the mechanisms behind these results, we exploit variation within U.S. firms across their foreign subsidiaries. Spillovers occur because U.S. firms not only expand capital inputs and output, but also increase their labor productivity, R&D activities, and market presence, particularly in foreign markets with attractive corporate tax regimes, following AI adoption. Our findings highlight the role of fiscal policy in shaping AI diffusion and offer new insights into how digital-era investments influence global economic growth.

How do climate policies in developed countries spill over to the developing world? Using a novel dataset that combines multinational firms' subsidiary locations with spatial emission data, we study how the carbon footprint of multinational firms in Africa changes in response to more stringent climate policies in Europe. Exploiting variation in multinationals' exposure to carbon prices across European countries, we find that emissions of their African subsidiaries increase as the multinationals' European operations face higher carbon prices. At the same time, multinationals reduce their domestic investment in Europe while worldwide investment remains unchanged — consistent with the notion that these firms shift some of their operations abroad. We confirm these results at the aggregate level, documenting a significant increase in economic activity and emissions in Africa. Policies to mitigate leakage should thus balance environmental concerns against development and equity considerations.

This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies through cross-border investments by multinational firms. We study firm investment responses to a major U.K. tax reform that drastically reduced the income tax burden for U.K.-based firms. Our identification strategy compares the investment outcomes of U.K. multinational firms in Africa to those of other multinationals with similar ties to Africa but not subject to the large U.K. tax changes that started in 2009. Difference-in-differences estimates show that U.K. multinational firms increased their subsidiary presence in sub-Saharan Africa by 17-26 percent following the U.K. reform. Exploiting location-specific nighttime luminosity data as well as local data from the African Demographic and Health Surveys, we also document increased economic activity and higher employment rates of African citizens within close proximity of local U.K.-owned subsidiaries. These effects are confirmed using novel data on local wealth. Our findings imply that, beyond the goal of motivating home country investment, developed countries' corporate tax policies impact developing nations.