Jake Smith, 
PhD Candidate

Naveen Jindal School of Management | Finance
University of Texas at Dallas

I'm a Finance PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas. My research focuses on empirical corporate finance.

I received a Bachelor of Science in Finance summa cum laude from the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee in 2013, and was awarded the distinction of Outstanding Senior in Finance. I then received a Master of Science in Finance from the University of South Florida in 2015.

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CV | Email | Google Scholar | SSRN

Tax Avoidance through Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions

with Jean-Marie Meier

Abstract

We investigate 13,458 cross-border, tax-haven mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from 1990 to 2017, totaling $4.2 trillion in deal value. These M&A result in $32.9 billion in recurring annual tax avoidance. $2.4 trillion of haven M&A is beyond what is predicted based on a gravity model with economic fundamentals. Moreover, we improve the measurement of a key data item in tax research–a firm’s tax residence–through a novel algorithm that embeds the residency laws of 150 countries and the associated tie-breaking provisions. We reassign the tax residence of a considerable fraction of firms relative to standard assignments.

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Conference Presentations

• Paris December 2021 Finance Meeting, online (scheduled)

• 2021 FOM Conference, Hanover

• 7th IWH-FIN-FIRE Workshop on "Challenges to Financial Stability," Halle (Saale)

• China International Conference in Finance 2021, Shanghai

• SFS Cavalcade 2021, online

• Midwest Finance Association 2021, online

• Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting 2020, online

• European Economic Association 2020, online

• 10th EIASM Conference on Current Research in Taxation, online

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Poster Session

• American Economic Association 2021, online

The COVID-19 Bailouts

with Jean-Marie Meier

Published as a pre-print in Covid Economics, Issue 83, 2 July 2021.

Abstract

We use hand-collected data to investigate the COVID-19 bailouts for all publicly listed US firms. The median tax rate is 4% for bailout firms and 16% for no-bailout firms. The bailouts are expensive when compared to past corporate income tax payments of the bailout firms. We compute the number of years a bailout recipient has to pay corporate income tax to generate as much tax revenue as it received in bailouts: 135.0 years for the Paycheck Protection Program and 267.9 years for the airline bailouts. We also document a dark side of the bailouts. For many firms, the bailouts appear to be a windfall. Numerous bailout recipients made risky financial decisions, so bailing them out might induce moral hazard. Moreover, lobbying expenditures positively predict the bailout likelihood and amount.

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Poster Session

• American Economic Association 2022, online (scheduled)