Simone Traini

About me

I am an Associate Professor of Accounting at NHH Norwegian School of Economics, where I teach Financial Statement Analysis to Master's and EMBA students.My research focuses on accounting, information, and taxation. In particular, I am interested in how firms and stakeholders respond to changes in information environments and tax policies.

Contact Information

simone.traini@nhh.no

Profile Pages

NHH, Google Scholar, SSRN, LinkedIn

CV

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Working papers

NEW DRAFT:Observable Information Acquisition, Social Costs, and Pay Dispersionwith Joel Berge and Trine Vattø

Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Accounting Research

We study how making information acquisition observable affects individuals’ decisions to acquire publicly available information and how this, in turn, shapes economic outcomes. We exploit a reform in Norway that made searches in public tax records identifiable to the person being searched, while leaving the availability and content of the information unchanged. Using administrative employer-employee data, we examine how pay dispersion varies across firms with different levels of post-reform search intensity. We find that pay dispersion increases more in co-worker groups employed by firms with lower post-reform search intensity, corresponding to an increase of approximately 3-4 percent relative to pre-reform levels. Event-study estimates show no differential pre-trends and indicate that these differences emerge only after the reform. Additional evidence from heterogeneity analyses and a survey experiment suggests that identifiable searches impose a social cost on acquiring pay information, particularly when targeting socially proximate individuals such as colleagues. Our results highlight that the effectiveness of transparency depends not only on information availability but also on the cost of acquiring it, and that making information acquisition observable can reduce effective transparency and increase pay dispersion.

NEW DRAFT:Customer Tax Uncertainty and Supplier Investment Deviationswith Tzu-Ting Chiu, Darci Fischer, and Petro Lisowsky

Revise and Resubmit at Production and Operations Management

This study examines the link between customer firms’ tax uncertainty and their supplier firms’ investment deviations. We find that customers’ tax uncertainty, proxied by current-year additions to the reserve for unrecognized tax benefits, is associated with an increased likelihood of underinvestment and a decreased likelihood of overinvestment by suppliers. Our underinvestment results in particular are more pronounced when suppliers (1) are more exposed to customers with greater credit risk and financial constraints, lower cash flows, and higher trade credit, and (2) have a higher share of total sales from their top customers, lower inventory turnover, and membership in the durable goods industries. These results are consistent with tax uncertainty exacerbating the holdup problem—suppliers underinvest in relationship-specific assets when they are concerned about risks associated with their customers’ tax uncertainty. Overall, our study provides evidence on the importance of tax uncertainty spillovers to key external stakeholders of the firm—suppliers.

NEW DRAFT:Organizational Responses to Offshore Transparency Shockswith Katarzyna Bilicka

Winner of the 2024 Bureau van Dijk prize for best paper in corporate finance at the Australasian Finance and Banking Conference
Under Review at Journal of Accounting and Economics

We examine how firms respond when offshore data leaks expose previously opaque corporate structures. Between 2013 and 2021, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released information on more than 800,000 offshore entities, revealing offshore structures linked to multinational firms. Using these disclosures as transparency shocks, we examine whether exposed firms adjust their governance and shareholder payout policies relative to unaffected firms. We find that exposed firms expand organizational oversight by becoming more likely to have directors responsible for operations, audit, finance and accounting, and legal functions, and become more likely to distribute dividends. These responses are accompanied by reductions in tax haven subsidiaries, while we find no evidence of changes in effective tax rates. Cross-sectional analyses show that governance responses are stronger when revealed offshore structures are more opaque and firms face greater tax-related media scrutiny, while both governance and dividend responses are stronger when shareholder protection is weaker. Overall, our findings suggest that the exposure of opaque offshore activities can reshape firms’ organizational policies in ways consistent with protecting shareholder interests.

The Value of Dissent: Market Reaction to Voting Intention Disclosureswith Tzu-Ting Chiu, Xi Li, and Rusha Nandy

This study examines the stock market reaction to voting intentions publicly disclosed by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the asset manager of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, ahead of its portfolio firms’ annual general meetings (AGMs). We categorize NBIM’s voting intention as “dissent” when it disagrees with the management’s vote recommendation for a proxy proposal at an upcoming AGM. We focus on proposals where NBIM’s votes are most likely to influence outcomes—those that pass or fail by narrow margins. We find positive abnormal returns around the announcements of NBIM’s dissent voting intentions, especially for portfolio firms with weaker corporate governance, larger NBIM ownership stakes, or proposals related to capital structure and board independence. These findings suggest that investors perceive dissent votes from an influential institutional shareholder as value-enhancing, particularly in situations where external monitoring is considered valuable. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on enhancing transparency in institutional investors’ voting practices.

Foreign Institutional Investors and Information Asymmetry: Evidence from Corporate Taxeswith April Klein and Georgios Voulgaris

We use firms’ tax policies as a setting to identify a mechanism through which foreign institutional investors decrease their informational disadvantage compared to domestic investors. Using a comprehensive sample of international publicly listed firms, and theoretically motivated by the equity home bias puzzle, we find that foreign investors decrease information asymmetry by influencing their portfolio firms to adjust their effective tax rates, upwards or downwards, consistent with the average tax position of their country and industry peers. We also find that this effect of foreign investors is less pronounced in corporate environments with lower information asymmetries, where the advantages to constraining management’s tax planning strategies are fewer. We address endogeneity concerns by exploiting multiple sources of exogenous variation in foreign institutional ownership. Our results provide a partial solution to the equity home bias puzzle and highlight the importance of transparency for firms’ tax policies.

Do Index Investors Impact Investee Firms' Disclosure Aggregation?with Linda Myers and Georgios Voulgaris

We investigate whether “passive” index-tracking institutional investors (index investors) impact the aggregation of their investee firms’ geographic disclosures. We find that when index investors own more of their stock, U.S. multinationals tend to reduce transparency about foreign operations by aggregating the geographic disclosures in their financial statement footnotes. However, this aggregation is less pronounced for firms facing higher information asymmetry related to corporate tax planning, organizational complexity, and low-quality accounting practices, as well as for firms owned by index investors with greater monitoring resources. Our inferences are robust to tests that address endogeneity concerns by exploiting the Russell index reconstitution as a source of exogenous variation in index investor stockholdings. Overall, our findings suggest that index investors influence investee firms’ disclosure aggregation and that their demand for informational transparency is nuanced.

Publications

Blockchain, Financial Reporting Quality, and Investment Efficiencywith Tzu-Ting Chiu, Jee-Hae Lim, and Ju-Chun YenJournal of Accounting and Public Policy (2026) 57(5-6): 107422

This study examines the relation between blockchain adoption and investment efficiency. Using a difference-in-differences approach with a matched sample of firms that disclosed blockchain adoption in 8-K filings between 2014 and 2023, we find that adopters exhibit higher investment efficiency after adoption compared to non-adopters. We also find that blockchain adoption is positively associated with financial reporting quality, suggesting that enhanced financial reporting quality might be a mechanism through which blockchain adoption improves investment efficiency. Further analyses show that the effect of blockchain adoption on investment efficiency varies with firms’ information environments and across types of blockchain applications. The effect is most pronounced among firms with weak information environments and those adopting non-cryptocurrency applications, where blockchain’s potential to improve investment efficiency is expected to be greater. Overall, our findings provide insights into how blockchain technology can influence financial reporting practices and corporate investment decisions.

Designing Net Wealth Taxes: Challenges in Valuing Shares in Unlisted Companieswith Henrik Skar, Peter Koerver Schmidt, and Erlend SolheimWorld Tax Journal (2025) 17(3): 1-42

Selected for the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation Working Paper Series

This article investigates challenges of valuing unlisted shares for wealth tax purposes in light of the legal principle of equality. Using a dataset of Norwegian companies sold between 2018 and 2021, we assess the accuracy of valuation methods used in Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland by comparing estimated values with sales prices. None of the methods reliably reflect market values, though their shortcomings differ. The Norwegian method, based solely on net asset value, leads to widespread undervaluation. The Danish and Swiss methods attempt to capture goodwill by incorporating historical earnings, resulting in fewer undervaluations but more overvaluation. In countries with constitutional equality principles, such disparities may pose challenges if a wealth tax is introduced. While the Norwegian method may be more defensible in some respects, its failure to account for goodwill remains a key weakness. We consider whether a refined version of the Danish model—with certain adjustments—could offer a more balanced alternative, while acknowledging administrative complexity. Ultimately, our findings underscore the need to address valuation issues if a wealth tax—especially a global one—is to be legally defensible.

Aggressive Tax Planning and Labor Investmentswith Nathan Goldman and Christina LewellenJournal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance (2024) 39(3): 697-725

We examine the association between aggressive tax planning and labor investment efficiency. Labor is an important input to production that is material to many firms, and prior research suggests that inefficient labor investments can negatively affect future profitability and growth. We provide evidence that firms engaging in aggressive tax planning are associated with deviations from expected labor investments, which is indicative of labor investment inefficiency. We find that our results are concentrated in labor underinvestment, consistent with risks and uncertainties from aggressive tax planning making firms more cautious when investing. Our findings are stronger among firms with greater tax risk, higher labor costs, and weaker corporate governance. Our study contributes to the literature examining tax planning consequences by providing evidence that a tradeoff exists between aggressive tax planning and investments in labor. Therefore, our results suggest that managers should carefully consider the cash flow benefits of tax planning in conjunction with the potential effects of lower labor investments to ensure that the overall long-term effect of the tax strategy is value-increasing.

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