Working Papers

Corporate Shadow Lobbying (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: Data from the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) of 1995 suggest fewer than 10% of public firms have disclosed any lobbying activity in the past twenty years. Anecdotes instead suggest significant corporate lobbying occurs without disclosure through the LDA either because firms avoid disclosure thresholds or potential non-compliance (i.e., they engage in shadow lobbying). To obtain a more comprehensive measure of suspected lobbying activity, I use precise movement data from 179 million smartphones to examine in-person interactions among firms, corporate lobbyists, and federal tax officials in 2019. I spatially intersect 4.5 trillion device pings with building shapefiles to identify devices persistently appearing in the offices of IRS field examiners and tax lobbying organizations and trace their movements to firm headquarters, the US Capitol, and the IRS national headquarters. Exploiting the launch of three issue-based audit campaigns by the IRS, I show that firms affected by campaigns significantly increased in-person visits to the Capitol and the IRS through the use of contract lobbyists, trade associations, and in-house lobbyists. Approximately 40% of firms that initiated such contacts disclosed no lobbying, with nondisclosure prevalent among both in-house and trade-association lobbyists. These results suggest that policy limitations allow substantial corporate political interaction to occur in private.


Presentations: University of Florida (2025); UNC Tax Symposium (Scheduled 2026); Geospatial Analytics in Business Conference (Scheduled 2026)

IRS Officials’ Stock Holdings and Corporate Tax Outcomes

Revising for resubmission, Journal of Accounting Research

(with Mike Mayberry and Scott Rane)

Abstract: We investigate the information content of personal stock trades by IRS officials. We collect transaction-level data on over five thousand IRS officials' personal investments and document substantial trading activity in individual stocks by officials across IRS departments. We find that IRS officials' trades, predominantly their purchases, generate positive abnormal returns on average, consistent with officials' information being not yet fully impounded into stock price. Next, we examine whether stock trades by these officials are associated with the firm's future tax enforcement outcomes. For a given firm, we find IRS officials' purchases are associated with subsequent decreases in tax reserves and specifically lapses in the statute of limitations. We also find that IRS officials' sales are associated with subsequent unfavorable tax settlements. These findings suggest that IRS officials possess, and trade on, material tax-related information and that these trades are associated with future tax enforcement outcomes for firms.


Presentations: Journal of American Taxation Association Conference (2025); Bretton Woods Accounting and Finance Ski Conference (2025); Indiana University (2025, Rane); National Tax Association 118th Annual Conference (2025)

Developed from my first year paper proposal

Media Coverage: Boston Globe, Marginal Revolution, Cato Institute Research Brief, National Affairs

Adaptation in the Accounting Labor Supply

(with W. Robert Knechel and Paul Madsen)

Abstract: The accounting profession has long attracted people seeking secure careers, but we hypothesize that fear of technological disruption has, in recent years, made accounting less attractive to students sensitive about job security. Using exposure to contemporaneous mass layoffs in a student’s hometown as a shock to the salience of job security, we first show that layoff-exposed college freshmen were more likely to choose accounting during the 1990s but became less likely in the 2000s. This pattern is stronger when layoffs are attributable to automation. The long-run impact of technological change on the accounting profession likely depends, in part, on the extent to which it adapts. To test this, we next measure the extent to which accounting curricula have adapted to technological change using course catalogs from a large sample of U.S. universities from 2009-2020. We show that accounting curricula have been slower to incorporate instruction about new technologies than other business disciplines and that accounting major attrition is significantly attenuated in universities where accounting courses quickly adapt to cover new technologies. Together, our results suggest that accounting education, which was once especially attractive to security-focused students, has recently become less appealing to them because they fear technological disruption and that this phenomenon is likely exacerbated by the failure of the accounting education system to adapt.


Presentations: University of Florida (2024), AAA Annual Meeting (2025), Florida Accounting Symposium (2025), NHH Norwegian School of Economics (2025, Knechel), Aalto University (2025, Knechel), Hawaii Accounting Research Conference (2026), Auditing Midyear Meeting (2026), Labor and Accounting Group Conference (Scheduled 2026)

Developed from my second year summer paper

Imported Tax Expertise

(with Kevin Munch and Marvin Nipper)

Abstract: Do firms respond to foreign regulatory scrutiny by recruiting experts from abroad? After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) drastically reduced the corporate tax rate in the US, public firms’ domestic effective tax rates fell below their foreign effective tax rates by up to 3 percentage points on average by 2022. We show that the TCJA led to increased inbound income shifting by U.S. multinationals and a substantial rise in the likelihood of being audited by foreign tax authorities. Further, using individual-level data on H1-B visa lottery winners obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, we show that firms that are more exposed to foreign tax authorities are more likely to attempt recruiting foreign tax experts. Among the firms that apply for foreign tax experts, we find that firms that randomly win visas succeed in reducing their effective tax rates without a contemporaneous increase in tax uncertainty. Our results concentrate among firms that recruit experts for their past experience with foreign tax authorities. Our findings suggest that US firms respond to increased foreign regulatory scrutiny by hiring experts with local soft knowledge, and that gaining access to such human capital likely reduces firm-level regulatory burden.


Presentations: European Accounting Association Annual Meeting (Scheduled 2026)

Developed from public accounting experience