סמינר במימון חשבונאות
Tax Avoidance at Public Corporations Driven by Shareholder Demand: Evidence from Changes in Shareholder Dividend Tax Policy
Speaker: Dan Amiram (Columbia University)
Abstract: We exploit exogenous changes in a country’s shareholder dividend tax policy to identify and quantify the effect that demand for shareholder value after dividend taxes has on tax avoidance by managers of public corporations. Specifically, we examine changes in corporate tax avoidance after the elimination of imputation systems, originated by the European Court of Justice rulings, which occurred in different countries in different years, using a difference-in-difference design.
We estimate that demand for shareholder value increases corporate tax avoidance by at least 6% of pre-tax income, which reflects a 16% decrease from the corporate statutory tax rate for the average public corporation. Our findings support that shareholder-level taxes affect managerial decisions, have implications for future international studies in a variety of disciplines including financial accounting and finance, and inform tax reform debates in various countries.
The article will be available from the finance-accounting seminar website:
https://en-recanati.tau.ac.il/Finance-Accounting-Seminars