Risk oversight by the board of directors is a key component of a firm's enterprise risk management framework, and recently, boards have paid more attention to their firm's tax-planning activities. In this study, we use a hand-collected sample of proxy statement disclosures about the board's role in risk oversight and provide evidence that risk oversight is negatively associated with both tax uncertainty and overall tax burdens. We find that risk oversight is most strongly associated with positions that yield permanent tax benefits and also with less risky tax-planning activities. Overall, the evidence suggests that board risk oversight is associated with more effective tax-planning practices.
We experimentally examine the effects of trait professional skepticism on fraud brainstorming performance. We find that groups with a minority, but not a majority, of high trait skeptics develop more fraud ideas than control groups with no high trait skeptics. Mediation analyses indicate that minority high trait skeptic groups also assess higher fraud risk, in part because they consider more fraud ideas. Low trait skeptics who brainstorm in groups with a minority of high trait skeptics tend to view the minority high trait skeptic as the best member of the group because of that member's unique insights. Their individual, post-brainstorming fraud risk assessments remain high, indicating conversion to the minority (skeptical) viewpoint. Our study contributes to the brainstorming literature by highlighting the importance of group composition. It suggests that firms can promote skeptical team judgments by leveraging individuals' high trait skepticism in thoughtfully composed interacting groups.
We examine the effect of a charitable contribution matching (CCM) program on employee effort. In CCM programs, employers commit to match employees' donations to charity. We expect CCM to activate a norm of other-regarding behavior, inducing employees to increase effort to benefit their employer. Experimental results robustly support our expectation. We find that CCM increases effort under both fixed-wage and performance-based incentive contracts. Further, our results suggest CCM is more effective at eliciting effort than alternative uses of firm capital. Specifically, CCM is more effective at eliciting effort than the firm allocating an equivalent amount of capital to either direct firm charitable giving or increased performance-based pay. Our study suggests that CCM has efficient and robust effort-elicitation benefits that increase its value as a compensation tool incremental to any initial employee selection benefits from CCM and any effort benefits from firms' direct charitable giving.
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