Roberts Reviews Tax Boycotts on SSRN Roundup

Here's my latest offering to Tax Prof Blog, reviewing a new empirical work, Tax Boycotts.

This week, Tracey Roberts (Samford, Cumberland School of Law) reviews a new work by H. Scott Asay (Iowa),  Jeffrey L. Hoopes (North Carolina), Jacob Thornock (BYU), and Jaron H. Wilde (Iowa), Tax Boycotts (March 29, 2021).

In Tax Boycotts, the authors evaluate the widespread assumption among tax scholars that the key risk deterring corporations from engaging in greater levels of tax planning is the loss of corporate reputation. The authors undertake a systematic set of studies to determine whether U.S. consumers actually respond to news about corporate tax avoidance with boycotts of corporate products and stock purchases. The authors survey a representative sample of U.S. consumers concerning their perceptions of and actions with respect to corporate tax planning and then examine weekly scanner-level data on consumer purchaser, daily data on retail stock purchase activity, and data for ongoing boycotts. The authors conclude that tax planning and tax avoidance are not particularly important drivers of past boycott activity in the U.S. They also conclude that boycotts also pose no threat to future tax avoidance activity. [Read more.]