Regulatory Compensation Limits and Business Performance - Evidence from the National Football League

Executives' compensation has been on the forefront of the public and political debate since the recent financial crisis. One of the measures publicly discussed is a general upper boundary to top management compensation packages ("salary cap", "maximum wage"). While such measures are novelties to the corporate world, the North American major sports leagues have been using maximum compensation regulations for decades. This paper exploits the 23-year experience with salary cap regulations from the National Football League (NFL). The results show a significant negative relation between the success of NFL teams and the amount of the net (after-tax) salary cap represented by the personal income tax rate of the teams' home states. A team from California (highest average tax rate) wins 2.256 games less per year and has an 11% reduced probability of making the playoffs than a team located in a no-tax state such as Florida or Texas. The paper contributes to and informs the ongoing public and political debate regarding the regulation of executive compensation, and its effects on the performance of the regulated entities.Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie

Future Orientation and Taxes: Evidence from Big Data

The paper analyses whether various aspects of a country's tax system have a positive or negative influence on individuals' attitudes towards the future. These attitudes are measured by an analysis of Google search queries derived from Google Trends which allow constructing an online futureorientation index for a sample of 58 countries. There results of this analysis indicate that capital gains taxes and value added taxes discourage future-oriented behaviour. Also, high personal income tax rates at the lowest income brackets discourage, whereas - surprisingly - the top marginal rates could positively influence an individual's future orientation. The paper contributes to existing research in three ways: First, it expands the existing tax literature by providing evidence that taxes can influence very fundamental personal values, such as individuals' general attitudes towards their future. Second, it contributes to a vast body of cross-cultural studies on future orientation by introducing tax law. Third, by using Internet search patterns the paper introduces these large, automatically gathered data sets into scientific tax research, thereby opening the possibility for further research opportunities. (author's abstract)Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie

The Effects of a Tax Allowance for Growth and Investment - Empirical Evidence from a Firm- Level Analysis

We contribute to the empirical literature on the debt bias of corporate income taxation through a firm-level evaluation of the European Commission's recent proposal of an Allowance for Growth and Investment (AGI). We use the introduction, the application and the repeal of a similar allowance in Austria during the early 2000s to evaluate the effects of the AGI on corporate equity and profit distribution. Our analysis provides evidence that such an allowance could increase corporate equity ratios by 5.5 percentage points and reduce profit distributions by 7.6 percentage points. These effects are stronger than those the previous literature for traditional Allowance for Corporate Equity (ACE) tax systems has identified. Additionally, we contribute to the recently expanding literature on the influence of ownership on tax planning as we find significant differences in the utilization of the AGI depending on individual specifics of the majority shareholder as well as depending on the number of shareholders of the respective firms.Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie

Comparability Adjustments. A Literature Review

This paper aims at providing a comprehensive overview of existing literature on the topic of comparability adjustments. Based on existing literature the most commonly used adjustments can be categorized in two broad categories: "accounting and financial risks adjustments" and "strategic/market adjustments". With the exception of working capital adjustments, the lack of guidance and recognized standardized application will quite possibly lead to continued discrepancies in their use. Taxpayers continue to struggle with the immense amount of documentation as well as justification requirements when it comes to adjustments, as there is no clear path to follow and very few practical application examples, which would unify the application of adjustments. As seen, even though the topic of comparability adjustments has been around since before the first version of the OECD TP Guidelines, the topic is yet to be fully explored in both official guidance as well as literature, research and especially practical tools.Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie

Practicing Experts' Views on BEPS: A Critical Analysis

In July 2013 the OECD, to tackle multinational tax avoidance, published its Action Plan against base erosion and profit shifting. The Action Plan suggests a variety of legislative and administrative measures to eliminate frictions from interactions between domestic tax laws and international tax treaties, including potential double non-taxation of businesses operating in several countries. By virtue of the OECD's structure, the proposed measures have been designed and developed predominantly by representatives from the tax administrations of OECD member countries. Our research investigates the views and opinions of other stakeholders in this process, namely tax experts from practice. We conduct a conjoint analysis, surveying experts in international taxation regarding their perceptions and beliefs on the effectiveness of the proposed actions. We find that experts rank actions that are aimed at enhancing international coordination and cooperation, as well as actions that reduce legal uncertainty, higher than other actions. Of lesser importance are antitreaty-abuse measures, further transparency at the taxpayer level and amendments to the definition of permanent establishment. (authors' abstract)Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie

E-Recruiting : Chancen und Risiken durch das Internet

Ziel der Diplomarbeit ist es, die Möglichkeiten aber auch die Gefahren der modernen Personalbeschaffungskanäle verständlich und praxisgerecht zu beschreiben. Im weiteren Sinn soll die Arbeit Personalverantwortlichen als Leitfaden bei der Rekrutierung zur Verfügung stehen und ihnen helfen die für das Unternehmen geeigneten Beschaffungskanäle auszuwählen. In den ersten Kapiteln wird auf allgemeine Begriffe und traditionelle Wege der Personalbeschaffung eingegangen. Danach werden die modernen Rekrutierungskanäle beschrieben und ihren Chancen bzw. Risiken gegenübergestellt. Zum Abschluss wird ein Beispiel aus der Praxis dargestellt

An analysis of the petroleum industry’s inability to deliver on early production forecasts : shortcomings in probabilistic modeling

Previous studies have confirmed that production forecasts in the oil and gas industry are exposed to a variety of biases. This thesis extends those previous findings by investigating the quality of production forecasts for oil fields on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, which were approved between 1995 and 2017. The research focuses on optimism and overconfidence biases. Both biases are observable in the production forecasts provided by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. By comparing annual production data with production forecasts, it is possible to draw conclusions pertaining to the quality of those forecasts. A variety of methods are applied to investigate and illustrate the magnitude of those biases. The findings illustrate that the reason operators do not attain set project goals is because of aforementioned biases rather than unexpected events. The systemic inability to deliver on what was promised is observable through the lack of forecasting quality improvement over time. Two correction processes are proposed to reduce the encountered biases. A reference class is established to put past outcomes in a distributional setting. Uplift and scaling factors are drawn from the class to adjust the biased production forecasts. The results show a clear improvement in the quality of production forecasts through the use of reference class forecasting. A second process is introduced in which a Bayesian framework is suggested to calculate updated production forecasts. The same reference class is used to provide a prior distribution, which is then updated by the initial forecast (signal) to determine a posterior distribution. The posterior distribution exhibts on average a greater variance and a lower mean than the initial forecast. Therefore, the updated production forecasts are better calibrated and the impact of the biases is reduced. Limitations arise regarding the availability of additional data, however preliminary results from the analyses are encouraging. Drawing on past experience to debias production forecasts is of paramount importancePetroleum and Geosystems Engineerin

Urban Emotions and Cycling Experience – Enriching Traffic Planning for Cyclists with Human Sensor Data

Even though much research has been conducted on the safety of cycling infrastructures, most previous approaches only make use of traditional and proven methods based upon datasets such as accident statistics, road infrastructure data, or questionnaires. Apart from typical surveys, which are known to face numerous limitations from a psychological and sociological viewpoints, the question of how perceived safety can best be assessed is still widely unexplored. Thus, this paper presents an approach for bio-physiological sensing to identify places in urban environments which are perceived as unsafe by cyclists. Specifically, a number of physiological parameters like ECG, skin conductance, skin temperature and heart rate variability are analysed to identify moments of stress. Together with data gathered through a People as Sensors app, these stress levels can be mapped to specific emotions. This method was tested in a pilot study in Cambridge, MA (USA), which is presented in this paper. Our findings show that our method can identify places with emotional peaks, particularly fear and anger. Although our results can be qualitatively interpreted and used in urban planning, more research is necessary to quantitatively and automatically generate recommendations from the measurements for urban planners

Comparing Twitter and LODES Data for Detecting Commuter Mobility Patterns

Local and regional planners struggle to keep up with rapid changes in mobility patterns. This exploratory research is framed with the overarching goal of asking if and how geo-social network data (GSND), in this case, Twitter data, can be used to understand and explain commuting and non-commuting travel patterns. The research project set out to determine whether GSND may be used to augment US Census LODES data beyond commuting trips and whether it may serve as a short-term substitute for commuting trips. It turns out that the reverse is true and the common practice of employing LODES data to extrapolate to overall traffic demand is indeed justified. This means that expensive and rarely comprehensive surveys are now only needed to capture trip purposes. Regardless of trip purpose (e.g., shopping, regular recreational activities, dropping kids at school), the LODES data is an excellent predictor of overall road segment loads