Tax enforcement and corporate financial irregularities: Evidence from China

This paper examines whether and how tax enforcement affects corporate financial irregularities in China, utilizing the merger of the State Tax Bureau (STB) and Local Tax Bureaus (LTB) in 2018 as a quasi-natural experiment. Our findings show that stricter tax enforcement significantly reduces corporate financial irregularities, especially for firms with lower tax compliance, poorer internal governance, laxer external supervision, and lower economic status. Furthermore, the mechanism tests demonstrate that stricter tax enforcement forces firms to reduce tax avoidance and tax reporting irregularities. These findings are consistent with the effective supervision channel. Our findings suggest that stricter tax enforcement can improve the quality of corporate information disclosure, and providing useful insights for alleviating information asymmetry and improving information environment in the Chinese capital market.     

Taxpayers' Behavioural Responses and Measures of Tax Compliance ‘Gaps’: A Critique and a New Measure

The work of Feldstein (1995 and 1999) has stimulated substantial conceptual and empirical advances in economists' approaches to analysing taxpayers' behavioural responses to changes in tax rates. Meanwhile, a largely independent literature proposing and applying alternative measures of tax compliance has also developed in recent years, which has sought to provide tax agencies with tools to identify the extent of tax non‐compliance as a first step to designing policies to improve compliance. In this context, measures of ‘tax gaps’ – the difference between actual tax collected and the potential tax collection under full compliance with the tax code – have become the primary measures of tax non‐compliance via (legal) avoidance and/or (illegal) evasion. In this paper, we argue that the tax gap as conventionally defined is conceptually flawed because it fails to incorporate behavioural responses by taxpayers. We show that conventional tax gap measures, which ignore the presence of behavioural responses, exaggerate the degree of non‐compliance. This potentially applies both to indirect taxes (such as the ‘VAT gap’) and direct (income) taxes. Further, where these conventional tax gap measures motivate reforms designed to increase the tax compliance rate, they will likely have a tax‐base‐reducing effect and hence generate a smaller increase in realised tax revenues than would be anticipated from the tax gap estimate.     

The welfare comparison of corrective ad valorem and unit taxes under monopolistic competition

The ad valorem versus unit tax debate has traditionally emphasized tax yield. On this criterion, ad valorem taxes outperform unit taxes in terms of welfare for a wide range of imperfect competition settings including Dixit–Stiglitz monopolistic competition. However, in a number of policy fields such as environmental, health, and trade economics, policy makers use taxes to reduce the production/consumption volume in an industry, i.e., to correct an externality rather than to improve tax yield. This paper compares the two tax instruments with respect to equal corrective effect in a Dixit–Stiglitz setting with love of variety, entry, exit, and redistribution of tax revenues. We find that unit taxes lead to more firms in the industry, less output per firm, less tax revenue, but higher welfare compared to ad valorem taxes.      

Tax compliance under horizontal and vertical equity conditions: An experimental approach

Tax compliance is a complex phenomenon, which requires to be addressed from different perspectives. We report the results of a real-effort experiment aiming at testing the effect of different equity conditions on individual tax compliance levels. We show that equity considerations seem to change individual behaviour only when a vertically unfair tax system is implemented. Also, random effects Tobit estimations show that being audited in the previous period has a negative effect on tax evasion, whereas the level of the fine paid in the previous period positively affects income underreporting. Also, we find that when subjects are in the vertical inequity condition they are significantly more likely to fully evade taxes than in the equity condition, whereas such result cannot be found in the horizontal inequity condition. Finally, we find a standard gender effect showing that female participants are less likely to evade taxes than man and that risk aversion negatively affect tax evasion behaviour.     

Mapping tax compliance: Assemblages,distributed action and practices: A new way of doing tax research

Tax compliance denotes the act of reporting and paying taxes in accordance with the tax laws. Current social science scholarship on tax compliance can almost entirely be divided into behavioural psychology analyses and critical tax studies. This article, which presents two cases of how tax compliance is constructed, challenges the explanatory reaches of today's social science approaches, arguing that an alternative approach to understanding tax compliance is worthwhile exploring. This other choice of approach, inspired by actor–network theory (ANT), adopts a more practice-oriented focus that studies tax compliance where it takes place as well as what it is made of. Consequently, this article argues that tax compliance is a socio-material assemblage and that complying is a distributed action. The article concludes by highlighting how an ANT approach contributes to the further theoretical development of social science studies of taxation.     

税费替代:增值税减税、非税收入征管与企业投资

通过减税促进企业投资和提振宏观经济是近年来中国税收制度改革的重要目标,但减税政策的实际效果却存在争议。本文利用2009年增值税转型改革,研究了减税对地方政府税费收入和企业非税负担的影响,从税费替代的角度揭示非税负担变动如何影响企业固定资产投资。研究发现:(1)增值税转型在减税的同时提高了地方政府非税收入并加重了企业非税负担,地方财政收入受增值税转型冲击越大,企业非税负担上升越明显。(2)上述应主要体现在小型、微型和民营企业上,大中型、非民营企业的非税负担未发生明显变化。(3)非税负担上升会显著抑制小型、微型和民营企业的固定资产投资,促使小型微型和民营企业通过持有更多现金和减少流动性负债来应对税费负担不确定性。本文有助于理解减税政策对小型微型和民营企业非税负担的溢出效应及其影响,为通过减税降费促进投资和提振经济提供经验支撑。     

After the death of inflation: will fiscal drag survive?

Declining inflation rates might have negative consequences for tax revenues. Phenomena such as the inflationary bracket creep in a progressive income tax system do not work any longer. With this background, the paper analyses the extent of fiscal drag for OECD countries since 1965. Some consideration of the role of money illusion and indexation in this context lays the theoretical base. A framework is presented that allows for the classification of fiscal structures with regard to the type of fiscal drag. The subsequent econometric panel analysis is performed for total and disaggregated government revenues. The results back theoretical considerations of inflation's impact on different kinds of taxes, which tends to be positive for individual income taxes and social security contributions and is negative for corporate income taxation. The paper concludes that both declining inflation and changing tax structures limit the potential for future fiscal drag.     

Relationship between tax compliance internationally and selected determinants of tax morale

Tax compliance has been studied by analyzing the individual decision of a representative person between planning and evading taxes. A neglected aspect of tax compliance is the impact of a social contract on tax morale. Such implicit contract between the individual and the state guaranteeing a high level of economic freedom, effective competition laws, an important equity market and high moral norms, is hypothesized to have a positive impact on tax compliance. In this paper, empirical evidence based on data from 30 countries indicate that tax compliance internationally is positively related to the level of economic freedom, the level of importance of the equity market and the effectiveness of competition laws and high moral norms.     

Reciprocity in Corporate Tax Compliance—Evidence from Ozone Pollution

In a tax—public goods reciprocity framework between citizens and the state, managers view taxes as a payment to the government in exchange for public goods, and hence they adjust their willingness to pay taxes as public good quality changes. We show that corporate tax planning intensity increases with ground-level ozone pollution. Revisions in ozone pollution regulations cause counties that failed the revised and more stringent standards to reduce ozone pollution. Consequently, firms headquartered in these counties reduced corporate tax planning intensity relative to firms in other counties. The ozone-tax link varies in the predicted directions with public attention to pollution, potential welfare loss due to ozone, managers’ stakeholder orientation, taxpayers’ polluting status, political preferences, and civic norms. We also find consistent results for Superfund cleanups of hazardous waste sites. Our research sheds light on reciprocity as a potential mechanism influencing corporate tax compliance.     

Sharing Risk with the Government: How Taxes Affect Corporate Risk Taking

Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk‐taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its downside. Consistent with this prediction, we find that risk taking is sensitive to taxes, albeit asymmetrically: the average firm reduces risk in response to a tax increase (primarily by changing its operating cycle and reducing R&D risk) but does not respond to a tax cut. We trace the asymmetry back to constraints on risk taking imposed by creditors. Finally, tax loss‐offset rules moderate firms’ sensitivity to taxes by allowing firms to partly share downside risk with the government.     

The relative efficiency of market-based environmental policy instruments with imperfect compliance

We study how the relative cost efficiency of three market-based instruments—emission taxes, tradable permits and output taxes—is influenced by the combination of accounting for incomplete compliance and pre-existing labor taxes. First, accounting for violations makes the policy instruments less effective so that environmental damages have to be larger to justify a policy. Secondly, including fines in a second-best setting provides a new means of collecting government revenues and of lessening existing tax distortions. We show that the relative position of grandfathered tradable permits vis-à-vis emission taxes improves considerably when incomplete compliance is incorporated in a second-best setting. A simple AGE model illustrates the results.      

Environmental Policy,Efficient Taxation and Unemployment

In this paper, I consider environmental policy as part of a mixed tax problem with a general income tax and linear commodity taxes. I assume that the wage rate is determined by bargaining between unions and firms. The results show that the change in the number of employed persons, following a change in the use of a tax instrument, affects the optimal tax structure via two channels; (i) it makes the tax revenues available for public expenditures more or less costly to collect, and (ii) it affects the aggregate demand for the good that causes the environmental damage. This means that the use of taxation to counteract the labor market imperfection is not easily separated from the environmental aspects of tax policy.JEL Code: D62, H21, J60     

How Firms Make Capital Expenditure Decisions: Financial Signals, Internal Cash Flows, Income Taxes and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

This paper empirically assesses the determinants of future net capital expenditures for a broad cross-section of COMPUSTAT firms from 1973 to 1989. We explore three general categories of factors expected to affect investment: (1) external equity financing, (2) internally generated accounting information, and (3) tax incentives. We find that external financing and information plays a role in that both positive stock returns and equity issuances indicate future increases in investment. The results suggest that high stock prices not only lower the cost of capital, but also signal good investment opportunities. Accounting information about internal sources and uses of funds are also important in the investment decision. In particular, net income and depreciation are positive indicators of future investment while there is a tradeoff between the payment of dividends and investment. Further, positive changes in available cash liquidity also motivate future investment. While taxes are not important in the investment decision on average, we find that firms with previously higher income taxes invested substantially more in 1985 and 1986. This coincides with the repeal of the investment tax credit and the accelerated depreciation schedules in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. We view this as evidence that federal tax policy in the 1980's induced firms with high income tax obligations to accelerate capital expenditures just before the favorable tax treatment of capital expenditures was eliminated.     

现行主要税种税收超额负担分析

税收超额负担是超过政府所征集的税收收入而形成的社会净福利损失。税收超额负担是税收效率分析的核心，它可以借助于消费者和生产者剩余以及无差异曲线进行分析，分析过程应更关注征税引起的价格变动的替代效应，我国现行主体税种都不同程度地破坏了各种市场资源配置的均衡条件，降低了经济运行效率，产生了超额负担。通过对税收超额负担的分析能够得出有助于提高资源配置效率的各种结论。     

Taxes and Corporate Policies: Evidence from a Quasi Natural Experiment

We document important interactions between tax incentives and corporate policies using a “quasi natural experiment” provided by a surprise announcement that imposed corporate taxes on a group of Canadian publicly traded firms. The announcement caused a dramatic decrease in value. Prospective tax shields partially offset the losses, adding 4.6% to firm value on average, and vary with the tax status of the marginal investor. Further, firms adjust leverage, payout, cash holdings, and investment in response to changing tax incentives. Overall, the event study and time series evidence supports the view that taxes are important for corporate decision making.     

Taxes and the global allocation of capital

Despite enormous growth in international capital flows, capital-output ratios continue to exhibit substantial heterogeneity across countries. We explore the possibility that taxes, particularly corporate taxes, are a significant source of this heterogeneity. The evidence is mixed. Tax rates computed from tax revenue are inversely correlated with capital-output ratios, as we might expect. However, effective tax rates constructed from official tax rates show little relation to capital—or to revenue-based tax measures. The stark difference between these two tax measures remains an open issue.     

Electronic Commerce and the State Retail Sales Tax: A Challenge to American Federalism

Electronic commerce, by magnifying problems with the existing sales tax, has precipitated reexamination of basic precepts of fiscal federalism in the United States, not just taxation of remote sellers. This paper examines: key features of electronic commerce; the Internet Tax Freedom Act and the Commission it mandates; tax assignments in the United States; problems in assigning sales taxes to subnational governments; constitutional impediments to requiring remote vendors to collect sales and use taxes; tentative findings of the National Tax Association's project on taxation of electronic commerce; and implications of the current debate over taxation of electronic commerce for intergovernmental fiscal relations in the United States.     

Tax morale and public spending inefficiency

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging tax compliance is an important and debated policy issue. Many studies have shown that tax cheating has to be attributed to a considerable extent to the tax morale of taxpayers. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the relationship between the taxpayer and the public sector; specifically, we investigate whether public spending inefficiency shapes individual tax morale. Combining data from Italian municipalities’ balance sheets with individual data from a properly designed survey on tax morale, we find that the attitude towards paying taxes is better when resources are spent more efficiently. This evidence seems not to be driven by some confounding factor at the municipality level or by spatial sorting of citizens and proves robust to accounting for alternative measures of both inefficiency and tax morale. We also find that the negative effect of inefficiency is larger if the level of public spending is lower and/or the degree of fiscal autonomy is higher.     

Exploring the role Delaware plays as a domestic tax haven

We examine whether Delaware is a domestic tax haven. We find that taxes play an economically important role in determining whether U.S. firms locate subsidiaries in Delaware and that a Delaware-based state tax avoidance strategy lowers state effective tax rates by between 0.7 and 1.1 percentage points, on average. The tax savings represent a 15–24% decrease in the state income tax burden and translate to an increase in net income of 1.04–1.47%. However, we find that the tax benefits of Delaware tax strategies are diminishing over time in response to initiatives by state governments to limit multistate tax avoidance.     

国外税务稽查经验及借鉴

当今,世界各国税务机关普遍重视稽查工作,一方面将财力、物力和人力向稽查部门倾斜,并借助科技力量和法律武器为税务稽查保驾护航;另一方面,加强税务稽查案源信息管理,以提高稽查工作的质量和效率。本文借鉴国外先进经验,提出了未来我国税务稽查应当在组织、流程以及法律保障等方面进行改进,以减少税收流失,提高全民纳税意识。