U.S. multinational corporations are well known for shifting income to low tax foreign subsidiaries to avoid U.S. income tax. Yet little is known about how multinational corporations opportunistically use low tax foreign subsidiaries for financial reporting purpose. Understanding this question has implications for U.S. accounting regulators to set enforcement targets. Using worldwide consolidated financial statements, I examine the role of taxes for multinational corporations to manage earnings in foreign subsidiaries. I find that by managing earnings in low tax foreign countries, multinational corporations can reduce the effective tax rate on pretax accrual earnings by an average of 4.3%. To examine the implication of opportunistic foreign earnings management on investors' equity valuation, I find evidence that investors do not seem to overvalue foreign managed earnings compared to domestic managed earnings, though foreign earnings are on average valued higher than domestic earnings.

This Master thesis deals with the valuation of ZAPA beton, a. s. to the date August 16, 2012. As a valuation method was used the earnings valuation method based on discounted free cash flow to the firm (FCFF). Important parts of Master thesis are analysis of external environment, analysis of building industry and financial analysis of the company. Process of valuation was implemented on the base of well-prepared financial plan and quantification of necessary input variables such as discount rate and rate of growth. Final part includes sensitivity analysis, for which was used Monte Carlo simulation. This simulation helps to determine main risk factors which do have the most significant influence on the final value of company.