基于连锁董事视角的税收规避行为传染效应研究

Existing academic researches on influential factors of corporate tax avoidance rarely pay attention to corporate social network attributes. As an important part of market economy, any company could not survive without interactions with others. As a result, the introduction of interlocking directors would set up close social networks within different companies, which could also build up non-public channels for corporates' private information transmission, leading to the contagion effect of similar behaviors within companies with interlocking shareholders. With the development of the board system in modern companies, especially the introduction of independent directors, interlocking directors have become a common phenomenon in Chinese capital market. Therefore, it is extremely meaningful to investigate the contagion of tax avoidance from the perspective of corporate social attributes.

On the foundation of interlocking directors' relationship, taking the listed companies in Chinese capital market from 2007-2014 as samples, effective tax rate (ETR), book-tax difference (BTD), and book-tax difference computed by fixed effect residual method (DD_BTD) have been used to measure the level of corporate tax avoidance. After controlling other influential factors, the OLS model has been adopted to empirically investigate the contagion effect of corporate tax avoidance.

The results revel that tax-avoidance information of tax-aggressiveness companies can be transmitted to interlocked companies through the channel of interlocking directors, which could reduce the cost of similar behaviors and decision-making uncertainty of the target companies, leading to the contagion effect of tax avoidance. After controlling possible endogenous problems and alternative explanations, such as the self-experience of tax avoidance and the group strategy within the same enterprise group, the conclusion we state above is still robust. What's more, further studies find the contagion effect of tax avoidance obeys the law of imitation progression, that is, the similar tax avoidance behaviors are more likely to contagion within companies who are in the same region. Finally, interlocking directors who act as CEOs in the board of target company are more likely to facilitate tax avoidance contagion than those who act as CFOs.

The research from the interlocking directors' perspective can take corporates' social attributes into influential factors of tax avoidance, which could enrich the dimensions of the researches on influential factors of corporate tax avoidance. What's more, the result in this paper is also helpful to construct the cost-benefits framework of interlocking directors' information transmission function and perfecting the theoretical research of the contagion effects. It is also of considerable value for investors and supervision authorities to understand the distinctive role of interlocking directors.