by Patty Mah
The American Taxation Association (ATA), in cooperation with PricewaterhouseCoopers, presented recent PhD graduate, Betty (Bin) Xing (BMath ’13, MTax ’15, PhD ’20), with the prestigious international ATA/PwC Outstanding Dissertation Award at the annual ATA mid-year meeting.
The American Taxation Association (ATA) is a section of the American Accounting Association (AAA), and is the largest community of accountants in academia. Through its membership, the ATA promotes tax education and disseminates tax research in areas of policy, law, planning, compliance, and economics. The ATA/PwC Outstanding Dissertation Award is awarded annually.
The award-winning dissertation, Tax planning vs coordination: The dual role of internal capital allocation examines how multinational corporations (MNC) allocate capital among their international subsidiaries. MNCs trade off managerial and tax-planning objectives when making international capital allocation decisions. The thesis explores implications of these trade-offs as pertain to cross-border collaborative research and development (R&D) projects. The study contributes to our understanding of the interaction between managerial and tax decisions made by MNCs. Xing’s research findings make an important contribution to academic literature and policy-making that may result in a loss of R&D collaboration with Canada.
Xing’s dissertation deploys an analytical research method to study a tax topic, and leverages the expertise of her PhD co-supervisors, professors Joyce Tian and Ken Klassen. Tian is an analytical research method expert while Klassen is a tax subject matter expert. The dissertation is unique in that the study combines technical knowledge in international taxation with theoretical modeling. Currently, there are less than ten accounting scholars in the world who primarily research taxation issues using analytical methods.
“The unusual combination of technical abilities in mathematics, economics, accounting, and taxation that Betty brings is truly unique and enables her to pursue a research area that very few academics are in and to contribute research that influence international tax policies,” notes Xing’s co-supervising professor, Ken Klassen.
Xing recently completed her PhD in international taxation and is an assistant professor of accounting and business law at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.