Quantifying the Costs of Intertemporal Taxable Income Shifting: Theory and Evidence from the Property-Casualty Insurance Industry
构建了一个模型来量化企业为避税而跨期转移应税收入的成本，并以1986年税改后美国财产责任保险公司的数据为例，发现转移成本随公司规模增大而降低，且边际成本随转移量递增。
This paper presents a model of optimal tax-motivated intertemporal income shifting given a quadratic cost function that relates the costs associated with shifting income to the amount of income shifted. By formally modeling the income-shifting decision, we: (1) show how parameter estimates of the income-shifting cost function can be extracted from a linear regression where a proxy for income shifted is the dependent variable, (2) provide insight into prior tax-motivated income-shifting research, and (3) clarify the interpretation of independent variables that capture the interaction between tax incentives and nontax costs. We then provide an empirical application of our method for quantifying the costs to shift federal taxable income by investigating the income-shifting behavior of firms in the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry following the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Our results suggest that the parameters of the cost function are negatively related to firm size, the cost to shift a significant amount of income is nontrivial, and the marginal cost to shift income increases as more income is shifted.