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Journal of Corporate Finance Vol. 42 2017

Do tax havens create firm value?

Siu Kai Choy1; Tat-Kei Lai2,3,4; Travis Ng5

1 King's College London · 2 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique · 3 Université Catholique de Lille · 4 Institut d'Economie Scientifique Et de Gestion · 5 Chinese University of Hong Kong

open access

Abstract

On October 11, 2011, a non-governmental organization called ActionAid published a report condemning the FTSE 100 firms for holding an unusually large number of subsidiaries in tax havens. Urging the government to implement appropriate actions, the report raised the firms' costs of holding tax haven subsidiaries. After this event, the stock prices of the nonfinancial firms experienced a 0.9% abnormal drop (corresponding to about £9billion in market capitalization). Those better-governed firms and those with larger shares of subsidiaries in tax havens experienced larger drops. We find some evidence that government scrutiny, reputation, and investor sentiment were plausible channels of such a negative impact.

DOI
10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2016.10.016
Volume
42
Pages
198-220
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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