기업지배구조가 조세회피와 기업가치의 관계에 미치는 영향

초록

This study investigates the relation between tax avoidance and firm value and the extent to which the relation is affected by corporate governance. Tax avoidance reduces resources that should transfer from shareholders to the government, so it might arguably make firm value increase. Corporate tax avoidance brings with it significant costs and benefits for management and shareholders. The relative difference between costs and benefits of corporate tax avoidance influences on the relation between tax avoidance and firm value. There are two alternative views on tax avoidance in empirical tax research in general. Traditionally, the first view is that managers undertake tax avoidance for the purpose of reducing corporate tax obligations only. From this view, tax avoidance is considered a value enhancing activities. Although this view also entails the potential costs of tax avoidance, the costs mainly include direct costs, such as the potential risk of detection by tax authorities. This view implicitly assumes that the costs of tax avoidance are less important and specifically, indirect costs are insignificant. The agency perspective of tax avoidance, however, suggests that opportunistic managers may exploit the obfuscatory nature of tax avoidance to mask rent extraction. The separation of ownership and control in corporate makes the agency costs related to tax avoidance increase. From the agency perspective, there are potential agency costs in the form of rent extraction by managers, reputational costs, political costs, and corporate transparency problem. These non-tax costs may offset the increasing value of corporate tax avoidance. The relation between tax avoidance and firm value depends on the difference between costs and benefits of tax avoidance. The previous literature has expected to enhance firm value by tax avoidance under the traditional view; however, from the agency perspective, the non-tax costs have increased and they have a detrimental impact on firm value in the recent research. Tax avoidance activities can create opportunities for the rent extraction by the manager. The corporate transparency could deteriorate by tax avoidance and it might bring with information asymmetry and higher cost of capital. Considering the above arguments and evidence, we put forth an alternative idea that tax avoidance has the negative relation with firm value at some points. It is important to understand what role corporate governance structure plays in the monitoring and control of corporate tax avoidance. This study, in this respect, suggests that corporate governance plays the mediating role in corporate tax avoidance. In this paper, we defined tax avoidance as the reduction of explicit tax payments over time through all means of income reported to shareholders (Dyreng et al. 2008). To measure tax avoidance, we use CASH ETR, GAAP ETR, Adj CASH, Adj GAAP, discretionary BTD, and TSE. CASH ETR measured by taxes paid divided by pretax income, and Adj CASH is the firm’s industry size CASH ETR less the firm’s CASH ETR. GAAP ETR measured by tax expense divided by pretax income, and Adj GAAP is the firm’s industry size GAAP ETR less the firm’s CASH ETR. Discretionary BTD is in Desai and Dharmapala(2006), and TSE is pretax income multiplied statutory tax rate less tax expense divided by lagged equity. The average CASH ETR is 0.255 and GAAP ETR is 0.267 in our sample. CASH ETR is lower than GAAP ETR. Pearson correlations between tax avoidance measures have a generally positive relation when we adjusted CASH ETR and GAAP ETR multiplied (-1). To test our hypotheses, we regressed firm value on tax avoidance variables and other control variables. To this end, this study employs CASH ETR, GAAP ETR, Adj CASH, Adj GAAP, discretionary BTD, and TSE as a proxy for tax avoidance and Tobin's Q as a measure of firm value. Drawing on factor analysis to choose governance variables, this work focuses on these four governance dimensions based on arguments and evidence in previous literature that shows independence on the board and controlling shareholder’s portion, institutional holdings, and foreign investor ownership. The other financial variables used in the analyses are collected from KIS Value and DataGuide Pro database. Our sample consists of the firms listed on Korean Stock Exchange over the period of 2001 to 2010, and the sample size is 3,405 firm-year observations for CASH ETR. The empirical results of this study are as follows. First, we test the relation between tax avoidance and firm value. This result shows that firm value has negative associations with corporate tax avoidance contrary to most previous common consensus. It suggests that the cost of tax avoidance is more than the benefit of tax avoidance so that tax avoidance makes shareholder wealth decrease. Second, I examine how corporate governance impacts the association between tax avoidance and firm value, using interaction between tax avoidance and corporate governance. We find that investors place a value discount on tax avoidance but the discount decreases with the efficiency of corporate governance. This is consistent with the notion that strong corporate governance facilitates the monitoring of managerial actions and thus alleviates outside investors' concern about hidden agency costs associated with tax avoidance. The findings of this study are robust to various tax avoidance measures, in particular, and controls. This paper expands upon previous research in several ways. First, contrary to previous literature that tax avoidance is considered a value enhancing activities, the result of my study point to tax avoidance has the negative relation to firm value on average, thereby not effectively employing the reserved resource by tax avoidance. Second, the result provides corporate governance could reduce the negative relation between corporate tax avoidance and firm value. Therefore, we concluded by describing the findings of the agency perspective on tax avoidance and corporate governance roles in tax avoidance. Our evidence that tax avoidance could deteriorate firm value provides an important consideration in corporate tax decisions. We still have not sufficiently explained that how big costs of tax avoidance and what are the significant non-tax costs, why management does tax avoidance despite negative effects on firm value.

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