A Hitchhiker\u27s Guide to Comparative Tax Scholarship

Comparative law offers scholars a fascinating lens through which to discover new insights about the world, but only if we take on comparative law projects. Few legal scholars devote a substantial strand of their research to comparative study, and so their work fails to benefit from the active and prolonged debates in comparative law. This Article makes a singular, but hopefully substantial, contribution: it seeks to render more accessible the comparative law scholarship with the aim of facilitating easier access to comparative law insights for tax (and hopefully other) law scholars. Put another way, the Article seeks to engage tax comparatists (or would-be comparatists) in a “co-operative enterprise” where we are more likely to engage with each other with the “goal of improving understanding.” In short, it seeks to enhance the discipline of comparative tax law by enabling other tax scholars to write better comparative tax law scholarship. The Article develops a taxonomy of the purposes of comparative tax scholarship. Understanding comparative tax law scholarship according to its purposes assists scholars in their thinking about how to make and evaluate decisions about their comparative choices. The purpose of a scholarly project dictates some, if not all, of the decisions about what and how things should be compared. Articulating and refin¬ing the purpose of a project achieves two goals for authors. First, it provides the scholar with a benchmark against which to make decisions about the scope of the inquiry; which units (countries) should be cho¬sen; how many countries are necessary for comparison to be robust; and how detailed a knowledge of each country’s tax laws, practices, and context is required for an effective study. These are the decisions that generate most of the debate among comparative law scholars. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it provides the scholar (and readers) with the ability to evaluate the quality of the work

A Hitchhikers\u27 Guide to Comparative Tax Scholarship

Comparative law offers scholars a fascinating lens through which to dis- cover new insights about the world, but only if we take on comparative law projects. Few legal scholars devote a substantial strand of their research to comparative study, and so their work fails to benefit from the active and prolonged debates in comparative law. This Article makes a singular, but hopefully substantial, contribution: it seeks to render more accessible the comparative law scholarship with the aim of facilitating easier access to comparative law insights for tax (and hopefully other) law scholars. Put another way, the Article seeks to engage tax comparatists (or would-be comparatists) in a “co-operative enterprise” where we are more likely to engage with each other with the “goal of improving understanding.” In short, it seeks to enhance the discipline of comparative tax law by enabling other tax scholars to write better comparative tax law scholarship. The Article develops a taxonomy of the purposes of comparative tax scholarship. Understanding comparative tax law scholarship according to its purposes assists scholars in their thinking about how to make and evaluate decisions about their comparative choices. The purpose of a scholarly project dictates some, if not all, of the decisions about what and how things should be compared. Articulating and refining the purpose of a project achieves two goals for authors. First, it provides the scholar with a benchmark against which to make decisions about the scope of the inquiry; which units (countries) should be chosen; how many countries are necessary for comparison to be robust; and how detailed a knowledge of each country’s tax laws, practices, and context is required for an effective study. These are the decisions that generate most of the debate among comparative law scholars. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it provides the scholar (and readers) with the ability to evaluate the quality of the work

Introduction

At Schulich, we see business law in a broad frame and understand that business law and policy includes the role of businesses in environmental protection, sustainable investing, inter-nation equity, and access to justice. We understand that businesses operate in broad social, economic, and political contexts, and as a community of scholars we care about the interactions of business law and policy with technology, governance and stakeholder rights, and economic, social and environmental justice. We hope that this collection advances vital scholarly and policy conversations

A Retrospective on the Contributions of Neil Brooks: So Far

This introduction to a symposium in honour of Neil Brooks originated in opening remarks at a workshop held on 10-11 May 213

Portrait of a Transplant Artist

This article explores the process of norm migration through the study of one tax expert, Victor Thuronyi. It situates the literature on the role of experts in tax norm migration and identifies core themes and gaps in the tax transplant literature; explores five themes, connected to the literature on the role of tax experts and tax transplants, that arise from a study of Victor Thuronyi’s contributions to tax transplantation; and concludes with some reflections on the benefits and challenges of having highly specialized, non-insider tax experts engaged in the exercise of drafting tax laws

Comparative Tax Law Guide

This extended bibliography is designed to support comparative tax law study by students, policy-makers, and tax practitioners. Studying comparative tax law is pure joy. And in addition to that, it enables you to: more deeply understand your own tax system and context; learn about another country’s system and context; draw general conclusions about tax law; press for or support tax law change; facilitate tax law harmonization or coordination among jurisdictions; delve into the role of tax in the spread of higher-order values like fairness, equality, transparency, or privacy; explain why a country’s tax laws are the way they are; and better appreciate the social, economic, and political realities of other jurisdictions.https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/oer_texts/1002/thumbnail.jp

Cross Hedging with Single Stock Futures

This study evaluates the efficiency of cross hedging with the new single stock futures (SSF) contracts recently introduced in the United States. We use matched sample estimation techniques to select SSF contracts that will reduce the basis risk of crossing hedging and will yield the most efficient hedging portfolio. Employing multivariate matching techniques with cross-sectional matching characteristics, we can improve hedging efficiency while at the same time overcoming the contingency of the correlation between spot and futures prices on the sample period and length. Overall, we find that the best hedging performance is achieved through a portfolio that is hedged with market index futures and a SSF matched by both historical return correlation and cross-sectional matching characteristics. We also find it preferable to retain the chosen SSF contracts for the whole out-of-sample period but to re-estimate the optimal hedge ratio for each rolling window.

Introduction

The dream for the Dalhousie Law Journal, included in the Foreword of the Journal’s first issue in 1973, was typically Dalhousie-modest: to have a “long and reasonably useful career.”1 As we celebrate our 50th anniversary, it’s clear that we have delivered on duration and over-delivered on purpose