Sky Blog
Share pledging—a financial strategy where corporate executives use their stock holdings as collateral for personal loans—has long been controversial. While it allows executives to obtain liquidity without selling shares, it also introduces risks, such as margin calls that can trigger …
Executive compensation and corporate taxation are both hot button issues, but can they be related? In a recent paper, we examine how CEO bonus contracts reinforce global tax incentives and show that executive pay practices helped drive corporate activity …
Stock repurchases by issuing corporations have always been controversial. But they have become even more so recently because of the perception that the excess funds used to finance buybacks have come from tax cuts and other sources (such as government …
What makes the corporate laws of some jurisdictions more attractive for entrepreneurs and investors than others in the global arena? Within the United States, the competition among state laws is a popular explanation for Delaware’s corporate law prominence. However, interjurisdictional …
Taxation of multinational companies (MNCs) has received increasing attention from politicians, the media, regulators, and academics. While the popular press provides considerable anecdotal evidence that large MNCs pay lower taxes than their domestic counterparts, academic research provides mixed evidence on …
Almost all countries have historically allowed businesses to write off interest expenses against taxable income. Critics argue that the tax-favored status of debt has created a corporate debt pile-up, thereby exacerbating economic downturns. This argument, which gained more attention after …
In recent decades, economies have become bound together through globalization, a phenomenon that integrates societies and creates business opportunities but also challenges tax policies. The amount of taxes corporations pay is a heatedly debated topic among policy makers, academics, and …
Existing research provides limited insight into what draws the attention of tax authorities to public information and how that information is used in the process of examining corporate tax positions. For publicly traded firms in the U.S., the Internal Revenue …
Fiscal policy—and taxation in particular—is one of the most important tools that policymakers can use to influence the economy. While the effect of corporate taxes on managers’ corporate investment decisions has been extensively studied, little is known about the effect …
With the recent release of the Trump administration’s tax plan, discussions of tax “reform,” or at least tax cuts, are once again at the center of American law and politics. Although the president’s tax plan is short on details, it …
There is a longstanding and growing public debate about the costs and benefits of automation. Earlier this year, Bill Gates argued that robots who take human jobs should pay taxes. Mark Zuckerberg recently warned the graduating class at Harvard University …
Tax regulators and acquisition sponsors have long been embroiled in a cat and mouse game in the context of corporate inversions—cross-border transactions in which a U.S.-incorporated public corporation is “acquired” by a foreign entity, and the survivor’s locus of incorporation …