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Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting

Erschienen in:

24.01.2018 | Original Research

Executive cash compensation and tax aggressiveness of Chinese firms

verfasst von: Wei Huang, Tingting Ying, Yun Shen

Erschienen in: Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting | Ausgabe 4/2018

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Abstract

We examine the influence of corporate compensation policies on firms’ tax aggressiveness in an emerging market where executive compensation is primarily in cash form. Based on a hand-collected dataset of 958 firm-year observations of Chinese listed firms for the 2006–2012 period, we find that firms paying higher executive cash compensation are associated with lower tax aggressiveness. This relationship also holds for the excess cash compensation measures which control for executive shareholding, firm profitability, size, growth opportunity, and board independence. We further document that mutual funds ownership pressure firms paying higher compensation to reduce their tax aggressiveness, suggesting adverse selection by mutual funds on firms exhibiting risky tax avoidance activities. High leverage offsets the negative link between cash compensation and tax aggressiveness, indicating a complementary effect between debt and tax avoidance, and, hence, suggesting that creditor monitoring is weak. These results are robust to the system-GMM estimation, which simultaneously account for the endogeneity of executive compensation, tax aggressiveness, ownership and control, leverage, and corporate governance. Our findings on Chinese firms have important policy implications for developing countries around the world with concentrated ownership structure, weak institutional environment, widespread corruption, ineffective rule of law, and ongoing significant social and political transformation.

Vorheriger Artikel Investors’ perception of CEO overconfidence: evidence from the cost of equity capital

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Conyon and He (2011) and Chen et al. (2011) review the compensation disclosure requirement by the Chinese Securities Regulation Committee (CSRC). Under the Chinese context, CSRC defines “top management” as all executives, directors, and supervisors. Total compensation paid to executives and board members includes salary, bonus, stipends, and other benefits.

See Tang and Firth (2011) for an example of how to compute tax-effect BTDs and income-effect BTDs and the different results of those computations.

Available in Chinese at http://www.casc.gov.cn/kjfg/200607/t20060703_337130.htm.

For example, income not taxable is listed as a category of BTD. According to Article 26 of The Enterprise Income Tax Law, equity investment income such as dividend income and bonuses are not taxed. Therefore it is considered as a driver for this BTD category. Chinese listed firms do not disclose dividend income separately, but it is conflated with investment income. Hence, investment income is used as a proxy for the non-taxable income.

The Enterprise Income Tax Law, enacted in March 2007 and in force since January 2008 homogenized (gradually) the corporate income tax rate for both foreign-investment enterprises and domestic enterprises to 25%, while prior to this EIT Law, foreign-invested enterprises had benefitted from a lower tax rate of 15% and domestic enterprises had paid 33%. Unreported results suggest that using unadjusted total BTDs in our analysis does not affect our key findings.

Similarly, Tang (2015) regress total BTD on discretionary accruals and the difference between the statutory tax rate and the effective tax rate, and their interaction term to measure the mandatory book-tax conformity.

We use all firm-year observations of non-financial and non-distress firms (distress firms are denoted as ST/*ST) to estimate the predicted cash compensation in Eq. (3). The R-squared of the prediction regressions are 46.6, 36.1, and 50.5% for executive cash compensation (EXEPAY), director cash compensation (DIRPAY), and average per person leadership cash compensation (EDSPAY), respectively.

In all regressions we have controlled for the fixed industry and fixed year effects, omitted variables, particularly these are “fixed for given industry across years” and “fixed for given year across firms” are therefore controlled.

Chinese listed firms issue multiple classes of shares. Shares traded on stock exchanges are A-shares and B-shares. Non-tradable shares are classified as state-shares and legal person shares. The state, its agency, and SOEs control the majority of the listed firms.

We thank our reviewer for an excellent suggestions here. Further tests on subsamples classified by the median size value of the sample reveal that the negative compensation-tax aggressiveness relationship still holds among larger firms although weaker compared to the effect among smaller firms. Regression results on the subsamples are consistent with those on the full sample, as reported in “Appendix B3”, and, hence, are not reported in the paper to conserve space.

Unreported tests suggest that the interactions between cash compensation and mutual funds shareholding are insignificant determinants of tax aggressiveness suggesting mutual funds exert stronger monitoring pressure on the basis of excess compensation that is not due to firm performance but a reflection of agency costs and managerial power.

Unreported tests on subsamples classified by the median leverage ratio and the median mutual fund shareholdings ratio show that the negative compensation-tax aggressiveness relationship still holds among high leverage firms, but not among low mutual fund shareholding firms. These results are again largely consistent with the results on the full sample, as reported in Tables 6 and 7.

For example in model 2, the influence of executive cash compensation on tax aggressiveness is LOG(EXEPAY) * (− 0.362 − 1.559 * FUNDSH + 0.438 * HFUND). When HFUND equals to 1, the sensitivity of tax aggressiveness to LOG(EXEPAY) is higher (while negative) and depends on FUNDSH.

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Titel: Executive cash compensation and tax aggressiveness of Chinese firms
verfasst von: Wei Huang
Tingting Ying
Yun Shen
Publikationsdatum: 24.01.2018
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting / Ausgabe 4/2018
Print ISSN: 0924-865X
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7179
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11156-018-0700-2

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