Research

Companies that make regular campaign contributions pay lower tax rates over time

Companies that make regular ongoing campaign contributions to lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee end up paying lower tax rates over time, according to a new study by Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

2014-12-03

On December 1, 2014 The Washington Post was the first of a number of outlets to report on a W. P. Carey research team’s study of corporate campaign contributions. “Companies that make regular ongoing campaign contributions to lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee end up paying lower tax rates over time, according to a new study by Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business,” wrote Catherine Ho. The new research was recently published online by the Journal of the American Taxation Association. The authors are Assistant Professor Jennifer Brown and two recent Ph.D. graduates from the W. P. Carey School: Assistant Professor Laura Wellman, now of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Assistant Professor Katharine Drake, now of the University of Arizona. Read more About Jennifer Brown: Assistant Professor Jennifer Brown researches tax policy, corporate taxation and tax avoidance, corporate political strategy, inter-firm social networks and the interplay of financial and tax-reporting choices. Her work has been published in leading accounting journals. She has been on the faculty at the School of Accountancy in the W. P. Carey School of Business since 2007. Before earning her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin she was a Tax Associate/Senior Tax Associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in San Jose, Calif.

Accounting Tax