Abstract Global tax enforcement policies have received increased attention since the financial crisis, with much stated focus on curbing perceived harmful tax practices of multinational corporations. Yet there is a dearth of evidence on possible differential effects of home‐country tax enforcement on multinationals. We take a step toward filling this void in the tax policy discussion by examining whether there is a differential relation between changes in home‐country enforcement and the tax avoidance of domestic versus multinational corporations. Using OECD data on 50 countries from 2005 to 2019, we find increases in home‐country enforcement are associated with lower levels of tax avoidance for domestic firms than for multinational corporations. Using a subset of firms from the Bureau van Dijk database, we find that multinationals avoid more tax in foreign countries when home‐country enforcement increases. Results are stronger for multinationals with a higher proportion of subsidiaries in low‐tax countries and when enforcement spending is low. These findings have implications for policy‐makers and highlight the importance of coordinated enforcement efforts across jurisdictions—such as the recently proposed global minimum tax—to successfully curb multinationals' worldwide tax avoidance.

ABSTRACT We examine if the effectiveness of business tax subsidies varies based on state disclosure laws. The prior accounting literature on government disclosure documents substantial variation in the quality of such disclosures, raising questions about their effectiveness for monitoring. State and local business subsidies for investment and employment have tripled in size over the past 30 years, but transparency problems inhibit clear assessments of whether subsidies achieve their intended outcomes. We examine both internal disclosure laws, which mandate subsidy reporting by the granting state agency to other state oversight agencies, and external disclosure laws, which mandate reporting to the public. We find positive effects of subsidies on local employment when subsidies are subject to internal disclosure laws; by implementing such regimes, governments could forego 1.2–1.7 subsequent subsidies per county, saving 419.0–593.5 million in aggregate. In contrast, we observe little effect of external disclosure, which we show is due to governments either substituting to other types of incentives or posting stale information that impedes public monitoring. We contribute to the government disclosure literature by demonstrating the real employment effects of internal government disclosures, and we provide policy‐relevant evidence about the conditions under which external disclosure regimes facilitate public monitoring.