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In this paper I review and describe the income tax disclosures currently required in firms’ financial statements. I discuss many of the problems with trying to estimate a firm’s actual tax liabilities and taxable income from the income tax expense and disclosures to the financial statements. In doing so, I reveal the conditions under which taxable income may most accurately be estimated from financial statements as well as those conditions which make this task difficult, if not impossible. Comments welcome.

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We find that employee stock option deductions lead to large aggregate tax savings for Nasdaq 100 and S&P 100 firms and also affect corporate marginal tax rates. For Nasdaq firms, the median marginal tax rate is 31 percent when option deductions are ignored but falls to 5 percent when one accounts for the deductions. For S&P firms, however, option deductions do not affect marginal tax rates to a large degree. In the spirit of DeAngelo and Masulis (1980), option deductions are important nondebt tax shields that can affect corporate policies. We find evidence consistent with option deductions substituting for interest deductions in corporate capital structure decisions. This evidence may explain in part why some firms use so little debt.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the share of executive compensation paid through stock options. We examine the extent to which tax policy has inuenced the composition of executive compensation, and discuss the implications of rising stock-based pay for tax policy. We begin by describing the tax rules for executive pay in detail and analyzing how changes in various tax rates affect the tax advantages of stock options relative to salary and bonus. Our empirical analysis leads to three conclusions. First, there is little evidence that tax changes have played a major role in the dramatic explosion in executive stock-option pay since 1980. Although the tax advantage of options has approximately doubled since the early 1980s, options currently have only a slight tax advantage relative to cash—approximately $4 per $100 We thank James Poterba (the editor) for helpful suggestions, and compensation consul-tants Robert Greenberg and Scott Olsen (of Towers Perrin) and Fred Cook (of Frederic W. Cook and Company) for helpful insights and background information. We thank Paul

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This paper investigates whether economies of scale and scope exist for tax planning. In particular, do multinational corporations avoid more taxes than U.S. domestic-only companies, resulting in lower effective tax rates? While the empirical results indicate that ceteris paribus, larger corporations have higher effective tax rates, firms with greater pre-tax income have lower effective tax rates. The negative relation between ETRs and pre-tax income is consistent with firms with greater pre-tax income having more incentives and resources to engage in tax planning. Consistent with multinational corporations being able to avoid income taxes that domestic-only companies cannot, I find that multinational corporations with more extensive foreign operations have lower worldwide ETRs than other firms do. Finally, in a sample of multinational corporations only, I find that higher levels of U.S. pre-tax income are associated with lower U.S. and foreign ETRs, while higher levels of foreign pre-tax income are associated with higher U.S. and foreign ETRs. Thus, large amounts of foreign income are associated with higher corporate tax burdens. Overall, I find substantial evidence of economies of scale and scope to tax planning.

This paper examines the evolution of the corporate profit base and the relationship between book income and tax income for U.S. corporations over last two decades. The paper demonstrates that this relationship has broken down over the 1990s and has broken down in a manner that is consistent with increased sheltering activity. The paper traces the growing discrepancy between book and tax income associated with differential treatments of depreciation, the reporting of foreign source income, and, in particular, the changing nature of employee compensation. For the largest public companies, proceeds from option exercises equaled 27 percent of operating cash flow from 1996 to 2000 and these deductions appear to be fully utilized thereby creating the largest distinction between book and tax income. While the differential treatment of these items has historically accounted fully for the discrepancy between book and tax income, the paper demonstrates that book and tax income have diverged markedly for reasons not associated with these items during the late 1990s. In 1998, more than half of the difference between tax and book income – approximately $154.4 billion or 33.7 percent

We simulate marginal tax rates (MTRs) from 1998 to 2000 using U.S. tax return data for public corporations. We compare these tax rates to those calculated from public financial statement data and find that Graham’s (1996a) simulated tax rate is the book variable most highly correlated with the simulated tax return rate. We provide an algorithm to approximate the tax return MTR if the book simulated rate is not available. Finally, we find that tax return MTRs are significantly correlated with financial statement corporate debt ratios, although less so than the correlation between book MTRs and debt ratios.

How prevalent is long-run corporate tax avoidance? Surprisingly, there appears to be no published academic work addressing this basic question. We define tax avoidance based on the ability to sustain a cash effective tax rate (the ratio of cash taxes paid to pretax income) below the statutory tax rate. It is important to note that avoiding taxes does not imply that a firm has done anything improper. There are numerous provisions in the tax code that allow or encourage firms to reduce their taxes. We investigate the extent to which firms are able to engage in corporate tax avoidance over periods as long as ten years. We find that 437 firms, comprising 22 percent of our sample, were able to sustain a cash effective tax rate of less than 20 percent over a ten year period. An initial examination of the characteristics of successful long-run tax avoiders shows that they are spread across industries but cluster somewhat in certain industries such as oil and gas extraction, insurance, and real estate. Other characteristics associated with long-run tax avoidance include having large firm size, being incorporated in a tax haven, having high ratios of property, plant and equipment to assets, being intangible intensive, and being highly levered.