Companies are adopting executive compensation recoupment (“clawback”) policies to discourage aggressive financial reporting choices. Recent research suggests clawback policies encourage other means of meeting earnings expectations. We suggest that reducing income tax expense is a means of meeting earnings expectations. We find that effective tax rates are lower after clawback adoption due to increased investments in tax planning. We identify three tax planning activities that clawback companies invest in to lower effective tax rates: purchases of auditor-provided tax services, increased connections to other low-tax companies, and use of tax havens. We provide evidence that effective tax rate decreases do not result from use of opportunistic income tax accruals, and that decreases are stronger among companies that adopt robust clawback policies. Additional tests indicate lower tax outcome volatility and longer, more readable tax footnotes following clawback adoption. Our results suggest a positive spillover effect of clawback adoption on corporate tax policy.

Although daylight saving time (DST) is thought to provide economic benefits, extant research documents various adverse effects of DST adjustments. However, prior research provides little conclusive evidence about the effects of DST adjustments on capital market participants. We examine the effects of “spring forward” DST advances, which disrupt the human sleep cycle and economic activities, on investors’ processing of earnings news. We find a delayed price response to earnings news released during the first week following a DST advance. We also find that this effect is stronger among firms with investors who are more likely to be trading on earnings news and among firms with less sophisticated investors. Our findings contribute to research on the unintended consequences of DST adjustments and to the growing literature on intra-investor variation in disclosure processing costs. Our study may be of interest to legislators currently debating proposed legislation that would eliminate DST phasing. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text.