Time Orientation in Languages and Tax Avoidance

Following Hanlon and Heitzman (2010) and Atwood et al. (2012), we use the term “tax avoidance” to refer to all reductions in taxes paid below the “unmanaged tax amount.” Our definition of tax avoidance encompasses different terms that describe various aspects of tax avoidance including tax avoidance, tax aggressiveness, tax sheltering, tax noncompliance, and tax evasion. As we cannot perfectly measure tax evasion, we use a general definition of tax avoidance as in previous studies. It is interesting to speculate as to whether FTR leads to more tax evasion or more legal tax avoidance. However, it is difficult to measure tax evasion accurately. As our prediction that FTR leads to more tax avoidance can apply to both legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion, we settle for the general definition.

For example, HM Revenue and Customs in the UK has proposed to increase sanctions and penalties for businesses or individuals that seek to avoid taxes (https://​www.​gov.​uk/​government/​news/​tax-avoidance-enablers-to-face-tough-new-penalties). Moreover, the European Commission has also planned a tax reform to tackle tax avoidance (http://​europa.​eu/​rapid/​press-release_​IP-16-1886_​en.​htm).

Corporate tax policy could be affected by an internal tax team or external accounting advisors (Klassen et al. 2016). Having said that, the decision to hire an external advisor or use the internal tax team for tax management is in the CEOs’ domain.

There is no research consensus about the relation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and tax avoidance. Some papers find that socially responsible firms avoid less taxes (Hoi et al. 2013; Lanis and Richardson, 2015). This is consistent with viewing tax payment as part of an organization’s wider CSR (McCredie & Sadiq, 2019). In contrast, other studies suggest that firms hedge against the potential negative consequences of aggressive tax avoidance practices by increasing positive CSR activities (Col and Patel, 2019). For example, Davis et al. (2016) find that CSR is positively related to tax avoidance, suggesting that CSR and tax avoidance act as substitutes when managers dedicate resources to maximize shareholder wealth. Our paper is silent on whether payment of taxes is considered to be a part of CSR; however, our finding is consistent with the view of tax payment being a CSR dimension. That is, strong FTR will lower managers’ perceptions about future benefits of current behavior (e.g., CSR investment); hence, CSR investment will be lower. Viewing tax avoidance as a part of (less) CSR, our finding that strong FTR is associated with more tax avoidance is consistent with such a view..

On the other hand, Lanis et al. (2019) find that the reputation of CEOs and directors improves when firms engage in tax avoidance.

For example, France is seeking 1.6 billion euros in back taxes from Google (http://​uk.​reuters.​com/​article/​uk-google-france-taxation-idUKKCN0VX1YF). Apple was ordered to pay up to $14.5 billion in an EU tax clampdown (https://​www.​bloomberg.​com/​news/​articles/​2016-08-30/​apple-ordered-to-pay-up-to-14-5-billion-in-eu-tax-crackdown).

This sample period is consistent with that in Atwood et al. (2010, 2012). Our sample period ends in 2007 because 2007 is the last year for which we can obtain the requisite data for foreign income taxes from Compustat Global, which proxy for firms’ multinational operations.

We thank Michael Drake for providing the data on statutory corporate income tax rates and worldwide versus territorial approaches.

Data 21: pretax income; data 57: exceptional items; data 218: income taxes paid.

Data 24: current income taxes.

The small number of clusters can lead to biased standard errors (Petersen, 2009). Thus, in untabulated analyses, we cluster standard errors by firm, by country, and by firm and year, and find in all three regressions that the coefficient on StrongFTR significantly positive at the 1% level.

The correlation between StrongFTR and LongTermOrientation at the country level is − 0.778. Though time reference and long-term orientation are highly related, they are based on different constructs (Huang & Kim, 2020). Lindner et al. (2020) document that under high collinearity between variables, removing one of these variables leads to biased coefficients and spurious results. They further find that high collinearity does not necessarily equate to bias and instability of results. They show an example where the correlation between two variables is 0.8 and note that “Given that in reality we do not know the underlying ‘‘true’’ model, it is important not to drop collinear variables, as doing so may lead to spurious, biased, or both spurious and biased results.” Nevertheless, we analyze the FTR effect by excluding its highly correlated variables. In an untabulated analysis, we find that our results are robust to excluding LongTermOrientation and other highly correlated variables such as Individualism and UncertaintyAvoidance.

The regression results in Atwood et al. (2012) are based on clustering by firm. In an untabulated analysis, we cluster standard errors by firm and estimate Eq. (3), excluding FrenchOrigin, GermanOrigin, CreditRight, LongTermOrientation, Individualism, PowerDistance, Masculinity, and UncertaintyAvoidance, which leaves a similar set of controls as in Atwood et al. (2012). We find that the coefficients on BTC and WW are negative and statistically significant at the 1% level, consistent with the findings in Atwood et al. (2012).

Without controlling for ABSDA, the coefficient on SentenceRatio is positive and significant at the 1% level. The sample size markedly decreases from 42,143 to 31,898.

Our sample, however, does not include firms located in regions where Romansh is a dominant language. According to Wikipedia, only 0.6% of the Swiss population are native speakers of Romansh.

In addition, it is well known that Switzerland has not been interrupted by war or revolution for a long time and is a stable society that maintains traditional values. The last civil war broke out in 1847 and ended in 1848.

Though state income taxes vary across states in the US, the corporate income tax rate is approximately 40%, similar across states. “The marginal federal corporate income tax rate on the highest income bracket of corporations is 35%. State and local governments may also impose income taxes ranging from 0 to 12%, the top marginal rates averaging approximately 7.5%. A corporation may deduct its state and local income tax expense when computing its federal taxable income, generally resulting in a net effective rate of approximately 40%.” (KPMG Corporate Tax Rates Table: https://​home.​kpmg.​com/​xx/​en/​home/​services/​tax/​tax-tools-and-resources/​tax-rates-online/​corporate-tax-rates-table.​html) .

“Switzerland levies a direct Confederation Income Tax (CIT) at a flat rate of 8.5% on profit after tax. Accordingly, CIT is deductible for tax purposes and reduces the applicable tax base (i.e., taxable income), resulting in a direct federal CIT rate on profit before tax of approximately 7.83%.” (http://​taxsummaries.​pwc.​com/​ID/​Switzerland-Corporate-Taxes-on-corporate-income).

We obtain the statutory corporate tax rate of each canton for 2007–2017 from KPMG Zürich. Since our sample period ends in 2007, we use cantonal corporate tax rates for the year 2007. The untabulated results are qualitatively the same if we use effective tax rates for 1995–2008 instead.

While Switzerland has 26 cantons, our sample firms are from only 23 cantons for which we have sufficient data to conduct analyses.

In all robustness tests for cross-country evidence, we control for ABSDA. We find that our results are robust to excluding ABSDA in all the tests.

In our main analyses, we code the language of each country on the basis of the most dominant language in the country. For example, Belgium is classified as a weak-FTR-language country because Dutch is the most dominant language, while Malaysia is coded as a weak-FTR-language country because the dominant language, Malay, is a weak FTR language. Singapore is classified as a weak-FTR-language country because the highest percentage of its residents speak Chinese. Switzerland is coded as a weak-FTR-language country since German is the most dominant language.

The sample size for this analysis is smaller than that in Table 4, since firms in some industries are always in the top quartile; thus, the observations related to these industries are dropped from the analysis.

Prior studies show that tax avoidance is affected by managerial characteristics such as executive equity compensation (Desai & Dharmapala, 2006). Measuring equity compensation as option grants plus restricted stock grants deflated by total compensation and replacing missing option grants and restricted stock grants with zero, we find that our results remain robust to the inclusion of executive equity compensation.