This report examines how U.S. corporate tax inversion announcements impact shareholder value. A corporate tax inversion is where a corporation moves its location of residency to a new jurisdiction with a lower tax rate than that of its original location of incorporation. Corporate operations are usually continued in the location with the higher federal effective tax rate. Since the first U.S. inversion in 1983, there have been more than 75 inversions (Marples & Gravelle, 2016). There has been growing division over the issue of whether or not inversions are acceptable as a result of the U.S. tax base deteriorating. Many politicians have been searching for ways to control the number of inversions through legislation. As a result, inversion trends have been changing due to governmental regulation, international business, and public opinion. For this analysis, data is collected on 49 corporate inversions that occur from 1983 to 2016. Event studies are conducted on individual trends to determine what types of inversions create the most value. Results indicate that pharmaceutical corporations completing merger and acquisition (M&A) inversions in Ireland after 2007 are valued the most by shareholders.

I examine the effect of administrative authority on shareholder value. Specifically, I study Treasury Regulations related to IRC ℗ʹ7874, which were intended to significantly diminish the ability of U.S. multinational companies to avoid U.S. tax through inversion. I find a negative market reaction on dates when Treasury signals it will strengthen inversion restrictions and a positive reaction when the courts overturn Treasury's attempts. Firms with high likelihood of inversion experience the strongest reaction, consistent with the market recognizing firm-level factors that make the use of this tax strategy more likely. I find that the initial notice related to the regulations elicits a stronger reaction than either the temporary or final regulations themselves. The study broadens our understanding of how shareholders react to Treasury Regulations, and how the intensity of that reaction varies along the path to enactment. It also brings some clarity to a mixed body of research regarding the economic impact of corporate inversions.

We examine a sample of corporate inversions from 1993 to 2015 by firms active in the U.S. markets and find that shareholders experience positive abnormal returns in the short-run. In the long-run, inversions have a deleterious effect on shareholder wealth. The form of the inversion and country-pair differences in geographic distance, economic development and corporate governance standards are determinants of shareholder wealth. Furthermore, we find evidence of a negative and non-linear relation between CEO total return and long-run shareholder returns.

Global investment patterns mean that effective taxation of foreign investors is of increasing importance to the economies of lower income countries. It is thus of considerable concern that the historical framework for cross-border income tax arrangements is not always well suited to allow low-income countries (LICs) effectively to generate tax revenues from profits on foreign direct investment (FDI). Several aspects of this framework contribute to the problem. This paper discusses, in particular, the likely effect of a shift by major economies from the system of worldwide corporate taxation toward a territorial system on the volume, distribution, and financing of FDI, focusing on LICs. It then empirically analyzes bilateral outbound FDI data for the UK for 2002–10 to determine whether the move to territoriality made corporations more sensitive to hostcountry statutory tax rates. Supporting evidence for this hypothesis is found for FDI financed from new equity.

Firms invert either through a pure inversion strategy or by merging with a foreign entity. We document that the impact of corporate inversions on the cost of equity is significantly different between the two strategies. We find that pure inversions increase the cost of equity by 10%, whereas inversions through mergers decrease it by 13%. Although both inversion strategies increase the inverting firm's shareholder value, inversions through mergers appear to create more value. However, before the tax reform of 2004, which eliminated the tax savings from pure inversions, most inversions were pure, whereas after the tax reform most were done through mergers. This finding suggests that the tax reform had an unintended consequence of reducing a managerial agency problem by eliminating the less beneficial inversion option.

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