In the paper, The Effects of Executives on Corporate Tax Avoidance, which is forthcoming in the Accounting Review, we investigate whether individual executives have an effect on their firm’s tax avoidance that cannot be explained by characteristics of the firm. Despite decades of empirical research in corporate taxation, little attention has been focused on whether individual executives have an effect on their firm’s tax avoidance. Until recently, most empirical tax research focused on the role of firm characteristics in tax avoidance. In this prior literature, executives were either ignored or treated as homogenous inputs to the tax avoidance process. In contrast, our paper considers the possibility that individual top executives are partially responsible for variation in tax avoidance across firms, not necessarily through direct involvement in the tax function, but by setting the “tone at the top.”

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