What are deferred tax assets/liabilities and how do they arise?

They arise because of temporary differences between what a company can deduct for cash tax purposes vs. what they can deduct for book tax purposes.

Deferred Tax Liabilities arise when you have a tax expense on the Income Statement but haven’t actually paid that tax in cold, hard cash yet; Deferred Tax Assets arise when you pay taxes in cash but haven’t expensed them on the Income Statement yet.

They’re most common with asset write-ups and write-downs in M&A deals – an asset write-up will produce a deferred tax liability while a write-down will produce a deferred tax asset (see the Merger Model section for more on this).