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Based on Lambert, Leuz, and Verrecchia's (2007) derivation of the cost of equity capital in terms of expected cash flows, we generate a testable hypothesis that relates tax avoidance to a firm's cost of equity capital. Using three broad measures of tax avoidance--book-tax differences, permanent book-tax differences, and long-run cash effective tax rates--to test our hypothesis, we find that the cost of equity is lower for tax-avoiding firms. This effect is stronger for firms with better outside monitoring, firms that likely realize higher marginal benefits from tax savings, and firms with higher information quality. Overall, our results suggest that equity investors generally require a lower expected rate of return due to the positive cash flow effects of corporate tax avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether internal governance affects the extent of real earnings management in U.S. corporations. Internal governance refers to the process through which key subordinate executives provide checks and balances in the organization and affect corporate decisions. Using the number of years to retirement to capture key subordinate executives' horizon incentives and using their compensation relative to CEO compensation to capture their influence within the firm, we find that the extent of real earnings management decreases with key subordinate executives' horizon and influence. The results are robust to alternative measures of internal governance and to various approaches used to address potential endogeneity, including a difference-in-differences approach. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of internal governance is stronger for firms with more complex operations where key subordinate executives' contribution is higher, is enhanced when CEOs are less powerful, is weaker when the capital markets benefit of meeting or beating earnings benchmarks is higher, and is stronger in the post-SOX period. This paper contributes to the literature by examining how internal governance affects the extent of real earnings management and by shedding light on how the members of the management team work together in shaping financial reporting quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation-Academic accounting journals publish research with potential policy implications; however, the published manuscripts are often not considered by policymakers. We argue that the academic research currently being produced by accountants can have an increased policy impact. Objective-Our objective is to discuss how the policy impact of the academic research currently being produced can be increased by effectively integrating, presenting, and disseminating information that is useful to policymakers. Contribution to the Academic Literature-We offer the following recommendations to increase the policy impact of academic research: (1) integrate a discussion of the debate surrounding the tax policy issue under study into the manuscript; (2) explicitly offer detailed interpretations and implications of the research results; (3) proffer normative statements based on the empirical evidence; (4) provide a synopsis of the manuscript's contribution to the policy debate via a structured abstract; and (5) utilize additional communication channels to increase the visibility of the academic research to those interested in tax policy. Contribution to Decision Makers-The recommendations offered in this paper can help to increase the probability that the academic tax accounting research currently being produced is both directly useful and effectively disseminated to those interested in the tax policymaking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We construct a new, parsimonious, measure of disclosure quality-- disaggregation quality (DQ)--and offer validation tests. DQ captures the level of disaggregation of accounting data through a count of nonmissing Compustat line items, and reflects the extent of details in firms' annual reports. Conceptually, DQ differs from existing disclosure measures in that it captures the "fineness" of data and is based on a comprehensive set of accounting line items in annual reports. Unlike existing measures, which are usually applicable for a subset of firms or are based on a subset of information items, DQ can be generated for the universe of Compustat industrial firms. We conduct three sets of validation tests by examining DQ's association with variables predicted by prior literature to be associated with information quality. DQ is negatively (positively) associated with analyst forecast dispersion (accuracy) and negatively associated with bid-ask spreads and cost of equity. These associations continue to hold after we control for firm fundamentals. Taken together, results from this battery of validation tests are consistent with our measure capturing disclosure quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the costs and benefits of conforming book and taxable income. Proponents argue that increased book-tax conformity will reduce aggressive financial reporting: managing earnings up increases taxes and will curtail abusive tax shelters because managing taxes down decreases earnings reported to shareholders. We use a panel of 139,536 firm-year observations across 34 countries over the period 1996-2007 to test whether high levels of book-tax conformity are associated with less earnings management. We find that higher book-tax conformity is associated with significantly more, not less, earnings management. We conclude that one of the primary claimed benefits of increasing book-tax conformity, more truthful financial reporting with less earnings management, is unlikely to be as large as previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 corporate tax executives to investigate firms' incentives and disincentives for tax planning. While many researchers hypothesize that reputational concerns affect the degree to which managers engage in tax planning, this hypothesis is difficult to test with archival data. Our survey allows us to investigate reputational influences and, indeed, we find that reputational concerns are important--69 percent of executives rate reputation as important and the factor ranks second in order of importance among all factors explaining why firms do not adopt a potential tax planning strategy. We also find that financial accounting incentives play a role. For example, 84 percent of publicly traded firms respond that top management at their company cares at least as much about the GAAP ETR as they do about cash taxes paid and 57 percent of public firms say that increasing earnings per share is an important outcome from a tax planning strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]