Earnings Management, Effective Tax Rate (ETR) and Book-Tax Gap (BTG)

Book-Tax Conformity and the Information Content of Earnings

We examine whether the information content of earnings is inversely related to the degree of conformity between financial accounting income and taxable income. Our inquiry exploits a natural experiment first examined by Guenther et al. (1997) in which a set of U.S. firms were forced to increase their book-tax conformity as a result of a change in the tax law. We find evidence consistent with th...

Underground Economy And Tax Gap

Political connections and tax-induced earnings management: Evidence from China

We use the occasion of a change in tax policy that raised the tax rate for many of the listed companies in China to examine tax-induced earnings management (TEM) from the perspective of political connections. We find that when the tax rate increased, only those affected firms with politically connected management engaged in TEM. This suggests that, in addition to motivation for managing earning...

underground economy and tax gap

Means-testing and Tax Rates on Earnings

Mike Brewer is Director of the Direct Tax and Welfare Research Programme at the IFS and a Research Affiliate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. His main research interests are in the impact of welfare reform and the personal tax and benefit system on families with children. He has evaluated the labour market impact of the working families’ tax credit, and the impact o...