Accounting Standards, Information Flow, and Firm Investment Behavior

Most empirical analyses of business fixed investment assume that firms exploit fully incentives for investment offered by the tax code, whether or not tax rules differ from those used to measure income for financial accounting purposes. In this paper, the authors investigate the reasonableness of this assumption by comparing the responsiveness of investment to tax incentives in countries with different tax accounting and financial accounting reporting requirements ("two-book" countries) with the responsiveness in countries in which tax accounting and financial accounting reporting are identical ("one-book countries").