Tax audits are a necessary component of the tax system, but policymakers and others have expressed concerns about their potentially adverse real effects. Understanding the causal effects of tax audits has been hampered by lack of data and because typically tax audits are not randomly assigned. We use administrative data from random tax audits of small businesses to examine the real effects of being subject to a tax audit.
What do we mean when we talk about “inequality”? There are numerous ways to measure it, each method with its relative strengths and weaknesses, and we must be clear what we mean when assessing inequality for policymaking.
This paper examines how US immigration-induced labor mobility frictions affect entrepreneurship and firm monopsony. I exploit a natural experiment in the US immigration system that unexpectedly increased Green Card (GC) related job-switching frictions for Indian and Chinese immigrants in October 2005. Using matched employee-employer data from LinkedIn, I confirm that this shock reduced inter-firm employee mobility for Indian and Chinese employees.
For some years now, environmental, social and governance investing has stormed the asset management industry with explosive growth. Tighter and increased oversight may finally bring it back down to earth.
We use textual analysis of mandatory accounting filings to develop firm-level, time-varying measures of exposure to individual government agencies. The measures vary predictably across industries and with broad regulatory interventions that expanded the scope and power of different government agencies, but also include substantial firm-specific, time-varying components.
Using hand-collected data on succession planning disclosures, we study how having a formal succession plan affects the efficiency of CEO turnovers. We find that firms with succession plans have a lower likelihood of forced CEO turnovers and non-CEO executive team resignations.
Today's marketing environment is characterized by a surge in multichannel shopping and ever more choice in advertising channels. This requires firms to understand how both digital and traditional advertising drive sales within the same channel (e.g., digital advertising affecting online sales) and across channels (e.g., digital advertising affecting offline sales).
This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several disclosures required for non-EGCs. Our findings are consistent with proprietary cost concerns motivating EGCs to eliminate some of the previously mandatory disclosures, which increases information uncertainty in the IPO market, attracts investors who rely more on private information, and leads EGCs to provide additional post-IPO disclosures to mitigate the increased information uncertainty.
We examine the human capital of IPO-filing firms and how going public affects their labor force. IPO-filing firms have high average wages and limited industrial diversification. Moreover, we document that a successful IPO increases departures of high-skilled employees to startups and diversification though employment growth in non-core industries.
We undertake the first large-sample analysis of foreign tax holiday participation by U.S. firms.
We investigate tax planning by privately-held corporations. Privately-held firms are commonly believed to face lower costs of tax planning relative to publicly-held firms, and thus are believed to engage in greater tax planning.
Why do firms offer non-wage compensation instead of the equivalent amount in financial compensation? We argue that firms use nonwage benefits, specifically female-friendly benefits, such as maternity leave, to increase gender diversity by efficiently attracting women.
This study shows that initiation of CDS trading for an entity’s debt increases the share of loans retained by loan syndicate lead arrangers and increases loan spread. These findings are consistent with CDS initiation reducing the effectiveness of a lead arranger’s stake in the loan to serve as a mechanism to address the adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the loan syndicate.
A follow-up to our pre-election coverage, this discussion explored the impact of the presidential and congressional race outcomes on U.S. business and the economy, trade and foreign relations, ongoing COVID-19 recovery efforts and more. The webinar featured Kenan Institute Director of Research Christian Lundblad, Political Quotient Advisors CEO and Kenan Institute Senior Fellow Mary Moore Hamrick, U.S. Chamber Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness Executive Vice President and Senior Advisor to the Senior Executive Vice President Tom Quaadman and Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown as moderator.
Firms are increasingly offering engagement initiatives to facilitate firm–customer interactions or interactions among customers, with the primary goal of fostering emotional and psychological bonds between customers and the firm. Unlike traditional marketing interventions, which are designed to prompt sales, assessing returns on engagement initiatives (RoEI) is more complex because sales are not the primary goal and, often, direct sales are not associated with such initiatives.