“瞒天过海”:企业避税与大股东掏空  

“Crossing the sea under camouflage”:Corporate tax avoidance and tunneling

作　　者：李星[1,2] 田高良 张睿[1,2] LI Xing;TIAN Gaoliang;ZHANG Rui(School of Management,Xi’an Jiaotong University,Xi’an 710049,China;School of business,City University of Hong Kong,Hong Kong,China)

机构地区：[1]西安交通大学管理学院,陕西西安710049 [2]香港城市大学商学院,香港特别行政区

出　　处：《管理工程学报》2020年第4期21-33,共13页Journal of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management

基　　金：国家自然科学基金资助项目(71372163、71672141);国家自然科学基金青年基金资助项目(71502134)。

摘　　要：本文在控股股东与中小股东的委托代理框架下,检验了控股股东是否会将避税作为开展复杂关联交易的理由,从而掩盖其掏空意图。以2008-2016年我国A股上市公司为样本,本文发现避税活动能够增加公司财务和业务的复杂性,为公司控制人的利益侵占提供掩盖。在采用公司实际税率作为避税活动的工具变量以控制潜在内生性问题的情况下,本文结论依旧稳健。进一步,本文发现避税活动与掏空行为的关系在治理环境较差的公司中更加显著。具体而言,当公司机构投资者持股比例较低,或者较少受到分析师关注时,避税与控股股东掏空行为的关系更显著。后续证据发现,避税活动较为激进的公司进行了更频繁的关联交易,公司也更加不透明。最后,本文从公司现金持有价值角度探究了普通投资者对公司避税活动和掏空行为的反应,发现出于对避税活动掩盖下的控股股东掏空行为的担忧,仅在掏空威胁较低的公司中,普通投资者愿意为公司避税活动节省的现金赋予更高的价值。Traditional tax studies regard tax avoidance as a value-creating activity that transfers resources from government agencies to firms.A critical assumption under this argument is that the interest between shareholders and managers is well aligned.However,when the agency problem exists,Desai and Dharmapala(2006)propose that tax avoiding activities will not necessarily create value to shareholders but can also be used to serve managers’own interests.This is because successful tax avoidance requires to confuse tax regulators,and thus conducting such activities would inevitably introduce complexity to corporate operations and reporting.Such complexity resulting from tax avoiding activities also provide shields for managerial self-serving behaviors.From this perspective,prior studies have documented extensively how managers use tax avoiding activities to pursue their interests.Nonetheless,little attention has been paid to exploring the role that tax avoidance plays in assisting controlling shareholders in exploiting other stock owners.This study aims at filling this gap by investigating the role of tax avoidance under the principal agency-principal framework.Unlike the sophisticated markets where corporate ownership is diversified and firms are actually controlled by management,concentrated ownership is highly widespread in emerging markets like China.The highly concentrated ownership not only provides enough motivation for controlling shareholders to monitor managers,but also directly endow them great power to appoint or fire senior managers.In this respect,the interests between controlling shareholders and managers can be well aligned,and the traditional principal-agent conflict is no longer a serious concern given the existence of controlling shareholders.However,new agency problem would arise.The highly concentrated ownership allows the controlling shareholders to easily divert corporate resources to places where they have higher cash flow rights,which is the so-called tunneling problem.Tunneling activities from

关 键 词：避税 掏空 工具变量 关联交易 现金持有价值 

分 类 号：F275.5[经济管理—企业管理] F832.5[经济管理—国民经济]