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.
CV | Email | Google Scholar | SSRN
Working Papers
Tax Avoidance through Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions
with Jean-Marie Meier
Abstract
We document a novel tax avoidance strategy: cross-border, tax-haven mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Tax havens have $2.4 trillion in M&A deal value beyond what is predicted based on economic fundamentals. Cross-border, tax-haven M&A results in $30.6 billion in tax avoidance annually, and cross-border, non-haven M&A results in an additional $35.8 billion in annual tax avoidance. This is the first paper to document that tax havens affect real investment on a large scale, and not just capital flows on paper. Moreover, we create an algorithm to derive the tax residence of any company given data on the firm's country of incorporation and headquarters.
Conference Presentations
Midwest Finance Association 2021 Conference, online (scheduled)
Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting 2020 Conference, online
European Economic Association 2020 Conference, online
10th EIASM Conference on Current Research in Taxation, online
Poster Session
American Economic Association 2021 Conference, online
The COVID-19 Bailouts
with Jean-Marie Meier
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.