Are Closely Held Firms Tax Shelters?

Investment Incentives in Closely Held Corporations and Finland ’ s 2005 Tax Reform

This paper analyses the effects of the recent Finnish income tax reform on the behaviour of a closely held corporation (CHC) and its owners. The main elements of the reform are cuts in corporate and capital income tax rates and the replacement of the current full imputation system by a partial double taxation of distributed profits. Considerable exemptions are applied to relieve the taxation of...

Competitive Behavior and Nonfinancial Objectives: Entry, Exit, and Pricing Decisions in Closely Held Firms

Because of the predominance of the assumption of profit maximization as the goal of the firm and its decision makers, especially in the competitive strategy literature, research has yet to investigate how differences in objectives might influence competitive actions such as entry, exit, and pricing decisions. This represents an important gap in the literature given the fundamental role of objec...

Are Worldwide Tax Systems Disadvantageous for Resident Firms Compared with Territorial Tax Systems ?

Governance Problems in Closely-Held Corporations

A major governance problem in closely-held corporations arising from the illiquidity of shares is the majority shareholders’ expropriation of minority shareholders. As a solution, legal and finance research recommends that the main shareholder surrender some control to minority shareholders via ownership rights. We test this proposition on a large dataset of closely-held corporations. We find t...

Multinational Firms Mitigate Tax Competition

An increase in the taxation of foreign affi liates reduces domestic investment, as has recently been empirically shown in Becker and Riedel (2012). This paper investigates the implication of this finding for tax competition. It is shown that an increase in the number of multinational firms (in contrast to purely national firms) may actually mitigate tax competition — counter to the popular opin...