On December 17, 2025, Till Münster (University of Mannheim) visited the Institute of Public Finance. He met with researchers from the institute and the faculty to discuss current research topics and presented a project examining how narrative disclosures in financial statements provide context for corporate tax outcomes. Using machine-learning methods, the study analyzes how information from the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) section helps explain the mapping between pre-tax income and tax expense. The results show that contextual information from the MD&A substantially improves the explanatory power of tax measures, while income tax footnotes often add little informative value or may even obscure this relationship.
