Measuring Corporate Tax Preferences

1 September 2002

journal article
Published by American Accounting Association in Journal of the American Taxation Association

Vol. 24 (2) , 1-17
https://doi.org/10.2308/jata.2002.24.2.1

Abstract

This paper examines the measurement of corporate tax preferences. It develops a model of corporate investment in which a certain fraction of the investment is immediately expensed. This model is representative of the treatment of costs associated with internally developed intangible assets, which generally are expensed for both financial reporting and tax purposes. Analysis of the model shows that accounting-based measures of tax preferences are deficient because such measures detect only tax preferences that generate book-tax differences. The paper then proposes a new measure in which pre-tax accounting income is replaced by pre-tax stock market returns, which detects tax-favored investments regardless of their financial accounting treatment. A comparison of the two measures for a sample of firms between 1992 and 1996 indicates that tax preferences are substantially higher than accounting-based measures suggest.

Keywords

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