Latest publication

A short article of mine, "Internationalization of Income Measures and the U.S. Book–Tax Relationship," just came out in the National Tax Journal. Not available on-line (other than the abstract), and I don't seem to have posted it on SSRN, but the cite is 62 N.T.J. 155-67 (March 2009).

The abstract is as follows:

Taxable income and financial accounting income are measures that use the same name but serve different purposes, leading to some differences in how they might ideally be defined. However, concern about managerial incentive problems may support integrating them, either to increase the accuracy of amounts reported or to reduce the resources that managers expend on reducing taxable income and increasing reported earnings. Political incentive problems, on the other hand, arguably support separating the measures, so that legislative eagerness to control the tax base need not promote politicization of accounting standards. The case for a largely one–book system may grow stronger, however, if pressures for international convergence in defining income on both the tax and accounting fronts lead to reduced politicization of both.