Seeking Shelter: Empirically Modeling Tax Shelters Using Financial Statement Information
利用美国国税局的保密数据，构建并验证了一个扩展模型，用于推断企业参与税收庇护的可能性，发现与避税天堂子公司、外国来源收入等因素正相关，为投资者和政策制定者提供了衡量极端税收激进程度的工具。
ABSTRACT: Using confidential tax shelter and tax return data obtained from the Internal Revenue Service, this study develops and validates an expanded model for inferring the likelihood that a firm engages in a tax shelter. Results show that tax shelter likelihood is positively related to subsidiaries located in tax havens, foreign-source income, inconsistent book-tax treatment, litigation losses, use of promoters, profitability, and size, and negatively related to leverage. Supplemental tests show that total book-tax differences (BTDs) and the contingent tax liability reserve are significantly related to tax shelter usage, while discretionary permanent BTDs and long-run cash effective tax rates are not. Finally, the model is weaker, yet still significant, in the FIN 48 disclosure environment. This research provides investors and policymakers with an extended, validated measure to calculate the presence of extreme cases of corporate tax aggressiveness. Such information could also aid analysts and other tax and non-tax researchers in assessing the benefits and risks of firm behavior.