The Stanford Tax Lab
Junyoung Jeong, Rebecca Lester, Kevin Smith
The paper models how the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, levied on financial-statement income, shapes reporting, finding it can improve or degrade reporting quality depending on managerial incentives and that real earnings management rises when the tax binds.
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Rebecca Lester, Anthony Welsch
In a randomized field experiment with the Hawaii Department of Taxation, a single informational letter raised taxpayers' awareness of the state's largest-ever income-tax cut by about 30 points and improved perceptions of affordability and fairness.
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Natalie Millar, Rebecca Lester, Joshua Rauh
Using 3,500 business incentives worth $6.2 billion granted in Alabama from 2012 to 2024, the paper finds incentives raised recipient employment by 61 jobs on average, up to 247 for the largest, at roughly $77,000 per job.
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Qiaoyi Chen, Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Daniel Yi Xu
Energy regulations that target firms within larger conglomerates cause regulated firms to cut output and shifted production to unregulated affiliates within their conglomerate.
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Lisa De Simone, Rebecca Lester, Aneesh Raghunandan
State and local business subsidies raise local employment when subject to internal government disclosure, while public disclosures have little effect.
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Rebecca Lester, Marcel Olbert
This review synthesizes research on how taxation shapes firms' investment, employment, and reporting, offering a framework grounded in the neoclassical theory of corporate taxation and highlighting where accounting evidence advances the field.
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Mary Cowx, Rebecca Lester, Michelle L. Nessa
Exploiting variation in firms' fiscal year-ends, the paper finds the 2022 rule requiring R&D to be capitalized rather than expensed raised affected firms' cash effective tax rates by about 12 points and led research-intensive and constrained firms to cut R&D and investment.
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Kevin A. Roberts
Using matched Census employer–employee data, the paper finds bonus-depreciation incentives produced lasting gains in incumbent workers' earnings and reduced job loss, with the strongest effects in import-competing industries.
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Rosanne Altshuler, Lysle Boller, Kevin A. Roberts, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato
Using IRS data, the paper documents how U.S. multinationals use hybrid structures that exploit mismatches between U.S. and foreign tax law, tied to over 35% of U.S. foreign profits by 2016, and shows restricting them reduces investment unless paired with a domestic rate cut.
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Christine Dobridge, Rebecca Lester, Andrew Whitten
Using U.S. corporate tax-return data, the paper shows firms rapidly build multinational foreign tax structures within three years of going public, expanding in low-tax jurisdictions and shifting intangibles abroad, especially under capital-market pressure to hit earnings targets.
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Daniel G. Garrett, Eric Ohrn, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato
Studying two U.S. international tax provisions, the paper finds local exposure to the 1997 Check-the-Box rules reduced U.S. employment and earnings as multinationals substituted foreign for domestic activity, while the 2004 repatriation holiday had no labor-market effect.
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Ryan Hess, Emily Black, Zaynah Javed, Jonathan Hennessy, Rebecca Lester, Jacob Goldin, Daniel E. Ho, Annette Portz
Tracing income through millions of partnership entities in U.S. tax data, we show that audits of complex partnerships yield a high return-on-investment relative to corporate audits.
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Douglas Laporte, Rebecca Lester
The paper finds U.S. equity crowdfunding improves access to capital for young firms banks rarely fund; successful issuers survive longer, attract more venture capital, and grow, with local increases in entrepreneurship and venture investment.
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Jeffrey L. Hoopes, Daniel Klein, Rebecca Lester, Marcel Olbert
Using a major U.K. corporate-tax cut, the paper finds U.K. multinationals expanded their subsidiary presence in sub-Saharan Africa by 22 to 28%, raising local economic activity and the employment of African workers near U.K.-owned subsidiaries.
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Sebastián Bustos, Dina Pomeranz, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, José Vila-Belda, Gabriel Zucman
Using administrative tax and customs data from Chile, the paper finds that OECD-style anti-profit-shifting rules failed to curb transfers to low-tax countries or raise tax payments, instead fueling demand for tax consultants.
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E. Mark Curtis, Daniel G. Garrett, Eric C. Ohrn, Kevin A. Roberts, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato
Using confidential Census manufacturing data, the paper finds tax incentives that lower the cost of capital, such as bonus depreciation, raised both investment and employment, with capital and production workers acting as complements rather than substitutes.
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Anne Brockmeyer, Alejandro Estefan, Karina Ramírez Arras, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato
Combining administrative data and an enforcement experiment in Mexico, the paper finds that raising property-tax rates improves welfare while escalating enforcement reduces it, so governments should lean on higher rates rather than tougher enforcement.
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Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato
The paper shows that limiting U.S. multinationals' profit-shifting to tax havens raised the cost of U.S. investment, leading exposed firms to cut global investment and domestic employment, with local declines in income and home values.
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