About

Christina Lewellen is an Associate Professor of Accounting at NC State University's Poole College of Management. Her expertise focuses on tax planning to help businesses structure their operations in a tax-efficient manner, emphasizing legal strategies to reduce taxes through understanding the subjectivity and preferences embedded in tax law. She has a background in private practice, where she spent five years specializing in tax planning and transaction structuring after earning her master's of accounting degree from East Carolina University and passing the CPA exam. Her interest in academia was sparked during her time as an adjunct instructor at ECU, leading her to pursue a PhD at Florida State University, where she researched international tax issues. Since completing her doctoral degree in 2016, she has been a member of the Poole College faculty, contributing to research and thought leadership in areas such as corporate and individual tax, corporate governance, and international tax. Lewellen has received multiple awards for her teaching and research excellence, including the NC State Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award nominee in 2023 and the NC State Department of Accounting Teaching Excellence Award in 2020.

Research topics

• Business
• Monetary economics
• Accounting
• Economics
• Public economics
• Finance
• Computer Science
• Market economy
• Econometrics
• Actuarial science
• Microeconomics
• Operations management

Selected publications

• Endogeneity and the economic consequences of tax avoidance

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2025-01-27 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Academic research investigating the economic consequences of tax avoidance is almost always interested in the consequences of intentional, deliberate actions undertaken to reduce taxes relative to income. Therefore, it is crucial that such research distinguishes between intentional and incidental tax avoidance, since failure to do so can create endogeneity concerns and lead to incomplete and incorrect economic inferences. In this paper, we first develop a framework that conceptually defines and distinguishes between intentional and incidental tax avoidance. We highlight that the endogeneity problem arises because intentional tax avoidance is not directly observable. We consider two approaches to mitigating endogeneity concerns and apply these approaches by reexamining two influential studies that investigate the economic consequences of tax avoidance. We show how controlling for past accounting losses eliminates the effect of tax avoidance on credit spreads (Hasan et al. 2014, Journal of Financial Economics, 113 (1), 109–130) and how using an instrumental variables approach changes the sign of the relation between tax sheltering and stock price crash risk (Kim et al., 2011, Journal of Financial Economics, 100 (3), 639–662). Overall, our paper punctuates the importance of both (1) conceptually distinguishing between incidental and intentional tax avoidance and (2) econometrically addressing the challenges that arise when empirical differentiation between incidental and intentional tax avoidance is important to the research question.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Investigation of the Array of Domestic and Foreign Tax Haven Location Decisions for U.S. Multinational Firms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Executive Compensation and Income Tax Rate Progression

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Tempering Financial Reporting Risk through Board Risk Management

  Journal of risk and financial management · 2023-11-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Recent corporate governance failures have heightened stakeholder expectations that the board of directors engage in robust oversight of the firm’s risk management processes. This expectation is in line with widely embraced enterprise risk management frameworks, which assert that strong board risk management is a key component of an entity’s risk management process. We use a hand-coded measure of board engagement in risk management from the recent literature to measure the robustness of that oversight for a sample of large, publicly traded U.S. firms and examine the relationship between robust board risk management (board risk management) and firm-wide strategies for mitigating financial reporting risk. While controlling for board composition-related characteristics, we found a positive association between robust board risk management processes and two avenues for mitigating financial reporting risk (i.e., more effective internal control over financial reporting and the selection of industry specialist auditors). Our results indicate that firms with more robust board risk management are associated with fewer actual instances of materially misstated financial statements and less earnings management.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Just BEAT it” do firms reclassify costs to avoid the base erosion and anti-abuse tax (BEAT) of the TCJA?

  Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2023-11-09 · 16 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Endogeneity and the Economic Consequences of Tax Avoidance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Tax haven incorporation and financial reporting transparency

  Review of Accounting Studies · 2022 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Accounting
  • Economics
  PublisherDOI

• Evidence on Firms’ Use of Subjective Evidence When Estimating the Deferred Tax Asset Valuation Allowance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 10 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• Aggressive Tax Planning and Labor Investments

  Journal of Accounting Auditing & Finance · 2022-04-05 · 11 citations

  articleSenior author

  We examine the association between aggressive tax planning and labor investment efficiency among U.S. firms. 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 strongest 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.

  PublisherDOI

• Aggressive Tax Planning and Labor Investments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nathan C. Goldman

  North Carolina State University

  7 shared

• Michelle McAllister

  Northern Arizona University

  4 shared

• Scott Dyreng

  Duke University

  4 shared

• Mark S. Beasley

  4 shared

• Bradley P. Lindsey

  3 shared

• Landon M. Mauler

  Florida State University

  2 shared

• Allen D. Blay

  Florida State University

  2 shared

• Simone Traini

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• NC State Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award…
• NC State University Outstanding Teacher Award (2023)
• NC State Department of Accounting Teaching Excellence Award…
• NC State Department of Accounting Research Leadership Award…
• American Taxation Association/PricewaterhouseCoopers Outstan…