We examine whether public disclosures of tax reserves recently made available through Financial Interpretation No. 48 (FIN 48) reflect corporate tax shelter activities. Understanding this relation is important to corporate stakeholders and researchers keen to infer the aggressive nature of a firm's tax positions from its tax reserve accrual. Our study links public disclosures of tax reserves with mandatory private disclosures of tax shelter participation as made to the Internal Revenue Service's Office of Tax Shelter Analysis. We find strong, robust evidence that the tax reserve is positively associated with tax shelters, while other commonly used measures of tax avoidance are not. Based on out‐of‐sample tests, we also show that the reserve is a suitable summary measure for predicting tax shelters. The tax benefits of tax shelters are economically significant, accounting for up to 48% of the aggregate FIN 48 tax reserves in our sample.

I examine whether earnings generated by changes in effective tax rates (the tax change component) persist and aid in forecasting future earnings. In addition, this study investigates to what extent investors incorporate the forecasting implications of the tax change component of earnings into stock prices. I find that there is a positive, significant association between the tax change component of earnings and future earnings. I use the interim reporting requirements of APB No. 28 (APB 1973) and FASB Interpretation No. 18 (FASB 1977) to further decompose the tax change component into an initial and a revised portion based on the first quarter estimate of the annual effective tax rates (ETR). I find that the initial tax change component is more persistent for future earnings than the revised tax change component. These results are consistent with my hypotheses that the initial and revised tax change components have differential persistence and forecasting implications, and dispute the broad notion advanced by prior literature that ETR-related earnings changes are transitory. Results from market tests indicate that the market underweights the forecasting implications of the tax change component and the mispricing appears to be driven by the transitory nature of the revised tax change component.

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We examine whether proprietary costs affect disclosure quality and how investors react to disclosure quality in a new proprietary cost setting. We apply Verrecchia's (1983) proprietary cost theory to the FIN 48 adoption setting and argue that proprietary costs result from beliefs that the new disclosures could weaken a firm's competitive position when negotiating with tax authorities. FIN 48 is an ideal setting to examine how proprietary costs affect disclosure given the proprietary nature of uncertain tax positions, and the ability to construct objective measures of both proprietary costs and disclosure quality. We construct disclosure quality scores for S&P 1500 firms and offer two empirical findings. First, we find a negative association between proprietary costs and disclosure quality. Second, investors reward firms for low disclosure quality, especially small firms and firms with high proprietary costs. Both findings are consistent with Verrecchia's (1983) theory, and suggest that proprietary costs moderate investor demand for full disclosure. JEL Classifications: G14, L15, M41, M44, M45

We investigate whether quarterly annual effective tax rate (ETR) estimates are systematically biased in comparison to year-end actual ETRs. We find that estimated annual ETRs in the first, second, and third quarters are systematically higher than year-end ETRs. We then investigate whether firms' overstatement of quarterly ETRs creates slack that is used for earnings management. We find that quarterly ETR increases are more likely to be reversed in subsequent quarters when firms would have missed their analysts' earnings forecast absent the reversal. Finally, we show that in the years subsequent to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), changes in the ETR continue to be associated with earnings management. These results, documenting patterns of annual ETR estimates and revisions, contribute to research about how earnings management is accomplished. JEL Classifications: H25; M41.