Tax Planning: The Role of Taxes for Business Decisions

Most finance and strategy courses do not consider the role of taxes in making business decisions. The goal of the course is to understand how taxes affect business decisions. In particular, the course teaches the tools for identifying, understanding, and evaluating tax planning opportunities. It is designed to be valuable even as (tax) laws and governments change, and the taught framework is portable in that it can be applied to the set of tax laws in any country.

Taxes are everywhere and have a direct impact on cash-flow. Having a basic understanding of how taxation affects business decisions is therefore very important and contributes to a solid financial literacy.

The role of taxes is applied to different decision contexts, such as investment, organizational form, mergers and acquisitions and multinational aspects. The impact of taxes on these decisions will always be considered in the context of the following themes: ‘All Parties’ (the tax implications for all of the involved parties have to be considered), ‘All Taxes’ (explicit and implicit taxes have to be considered), and ‘All Costs’ (all costs, tax and non-tax costs, have to be considered). All aspects of the course will discuss empirical applications. The class features a guest lecture by a partner of a big-4 accounting firm.

Large parts of the course will be based on the following textbook that is used in the leading business schools around the world: Scholes, Wolfson, Erickson, Hanlon, Maydew and Shevlin: Taxes and Business Strategy: A Planning Approach.