“They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory,” Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said in an interview. “Walmart made a smart move in increasing wages and investing in human capital. Where they screwed up was politicizing it.”

Since President Trump signed the tax law last month, a number of large companies — including AT&T, Southwest Airlines and Wells Fargo — have said they were using the savings to help their employees. On Thursday, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced that it would give a $2,000 bonus to 60,000 hourly and salaried employees.

“It is only proper that our employees share in the savings generated by tax reform,” Sergio Marchionne, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Walmart, which is the country’s single largest corporate taxpayer, said in a statement Thursday that it was still determining how much it would save as a result of the new law.

Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit research group, said it was difficult to forecast precisely how much Walmart would save. But based on the company’s average annual United States earnings over the past five years, he said, savings from the cut in the corporate tax rate alone could be roughly $2.2 billion a year, or 40 percent. He said the figure could be higher or lower depending on tax breaks the company might be losing, or new advantages in the treatment of capital investments and other provisions.

Walmart said the wage increases and bonuses would cost the company roughly $700 million.

“Tax reform gives us the opportunity to be more competitive globally and to accelerate plans for the U.S.,” Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, said in a statement.

Still, many economists are skeptical that the tax cut will have a meaningful impact on wages. In an economic research memo released on Thursday, Goldman Sachs wrote that “we expect no significant short-term effect of tax reform on” average hourly earnings.