期权激励、媒体关注与税收激进行为: 基于媒体情绪的公司治理机制研究

The separation of ownership and control in modern corporations creates a conflict between shareholders and managers. Based on equity incentives, executive compensation contracts are one potential mechanism for aligning the interests of stakeholders, which can expose the managers’ wealth to the fluctuation of stock price. Compared to stock incentives, options could stimulate the risk aggressiveness of managers owing to its convex function. The primary purpose of this paper is to explore whether option incentives are positively related to managers’ tax aggressiveness propensity.
However, every coin has two sides. The high sensitivity of managers’ wealth to stock price offered by options holdings motivates managers to engage in short-termism behavior of inflating current stock price at the expense of long-term firm value by manipulating accounting numbers, and even educing future stock crashes. Therefore, we want to investigate whether there exists an effective corporate governance mechanism to limit this effect. Considering the function of information spreading, we regard media coverage as an effective external supervision mechanism to restrict the excessive aggressiveness from option incentives. Moreover, we explore this supervision function under different coverage modes.
After controlling endogenous problem, we chose listed companies in Chinese capital market from 2011-2014 as our research sample and use big-data analysis to identify the proxy variable of media coverage to implement empirical research. The result shows that option incentives are an effective way to motivate managers’ risk appetite, encourage a company to take a more aggressive tax position. However, media coverage plays a vital role in external supervision mechanism to constrain this aggressive behavior by exposing the company under the general public.
Moreover, we examined the function of media coverage under different coverage modes, and found that the supervision effect would increase in extreme consensus environment(both extreme positive and extreme negative environments). Compared to options, we didn’t find the same result on stock incentives in future researches due to the symmetric influence of risks and returns, which further justifies the risk-stimulus function of option incentives. These results are still robust if other measurements of option incentives are chosen.
This paper extends the research of option incentives on tax aggressive area and push the research of media coverage into substantial content level, which has important theoretical and practical implications.