Tax Aggressiveness And Incremental Information Content Of Taxable Income

Abstract

It has been widely known that book income plays an important role in helping investors determining the stock prices of companies. However, most investors are uncertain about the information content of taxable income, mostly because taxable income is not publicly provided. The grossed up book income is used as a proxy for taxable income because the data on taxable income is not publicly available. In this paper, I examine the information content of taxable income to see if taxable income helps investors determine companies' stock prices. The prediction in my second research question is based on the intuition that the quality of taxable income will be diminished when firms are tax aggressive to minimize their tax payments.