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This paper aims to present a study on the effect of income and expense shifting on the corporate income tax evasion – an example of intentional noncompliance practiced by tax agents. The authors expected that the tool used would differentiate the extent of understatement of tax liability.

Two experiments were conducted in which young (N = 62) and experienced (N = 68) tax agents read a scenario placing them in a position of an employee responsible for tax planning and calculations of tax liabilities. The respondents’ task was to decide about the extent of the tax liability understatement using income or expense shifting.

Research demonstrated significantly higher extent of corporate income tax understatement when using income shifting compared to expense shifting in case of experienced tax agents (Study 2) and on tendency level among young tax agents (Study 1).

Results of the studies might be of interest to managers paying attention to tax procedures within the company, governmental agencies investigating corporate tax evasion, as well as educators responsible for tax agents’ initial training and lifelong learning.

This study concentrates on tax agents who are employed in companies and corporate income tax evasion, which has not been analyzed in the literature so far.

This study aims to investigate the role of negative media coverage of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in deterring tax avoidance. Inspired by media agenda-setting theory and legitimacy theory, this study hypothesises that an increase in ESG negative media coverage should cause a reputational drawback, leading companies to reduce tax avoidance to regain their legitimacy. Hence, this study examines a novel channel that links ESG and taxation.

This study uses panel regression analysis to examine the relationship between negative media coverage of ESG issues and tax avoidance among the largest European entities. This study considers different measures of tax avoidance and negative media coverage.

The results show that negative media coverage of ESG issues is negatively associated with tax avoidance, suggesting that media can act as an external monitor for corporate taxation.

The findings have implications for policymakers and regulators, which should consider tax transparency when dealing with ESG disclosure requirements. Tax disclosure should be integrated into ESG reporting.

The study has social implications related to the media, which act as watchdogs for firms’ irresponsible practices. According to this study’s findings, increased media pressure has the power to induce a better alignment between declared ESG policies and tax strategies.

This study contributes to the literature on the mechanisms that discourage tax avoidance and the literature on the relationship between ESG and taxation by shedding light on the role of media coverage.

This study examines whether and how government fiscal pressure influences corporate charitable giving (CCG).

The authors exploit sub-national tax revenue sharing changes as exogenous variations to government’s fiscal pressure at the city level and then construct a quasi difference-in-differences (DiD) model to conduct the analysis based on a sample that consists of 14,168 firm-year observations in China during the period of 2003 to 2012.

The authors found that firms increase charitable donations when local governments face higher fiscal pressure. Such effects are more pronounced for firms that have stronger demand for political connectedness in the sample period. Furthermore, this study’s findings suggest that the timing strategy of donating helps firms to lower the effective tax rate and to build stronger political connections. In addition, donating firms outperform non-donating firms in terms of bank loan access and market reputation.

The authors contribute to at least three lines of literature: first, extend the understanding of timing strategies of corporate charitable behaviors; second, contribute to the literature studying the “crowd out” effect between government-provided charitable funds and private donations; finally, contribute to the emerging literature exploring the financial interests associated with corporate donation strategy (Claessens et al., 2008; Cull et al., 2015).

This research aims to examine the association between political connection and tax aggressiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of business ethics in the association between political connection and tax aggressiveness.

This study employs a multiple regression method for 147 manufacturing firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during the pandemic era.

Political connection has no association with tax aggressiveness. However, political connection has a negative (positive) association with tax aggressiveness in more (less) ethical firms. The results are robust after controlling for year-fixed effects, endogeneity issues and other tax aggressiveness measurements.

Political connection is often cited as the driver of unethical business, including tax aggressiveness. However, this paper claims and finds that political connection is a double-edged sword. Ethical firms use political connection to reduce their tax aggressiveness, and vice versa. Previous research has paid little attention to this topic. This paper also uses COVID-19 as a natural experiment to highlight the importance of corporate social responsibility activities as business ethics.

This paper examines the short- and long-run effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on tax revenue in Ghana.

The paper adopts the autoregressive distributed lag approach to estimate FDI’s long-run and short-run effects on tax revenue. The study uses time-series data from 1983 to 2019 for Ghana, mainly obtained from The Bank of Ghana, the World Bank and the IMF.

The results show that, in the short-run, FDI has no significant effect on direct tax revenue and total tax revenue but significantly hurts indirect tax revenue. In the long run, however, the results show that FDI has significant positive effects on indirect tax revenue and total tax revenue but no significant effect on direct tax revenue.

Empirical studies often fail to analyse the short-run and long-run effects of FDI on tax revenue. This study contributes to the mixed literature by analysing the short-run and long-run effects of FDI on tax revenue in an emerging market context. Additionally, this study employs three tax revenue measures in analysing the nexus.

This paper attempts to develop a simple, static model of tax administration that is capable of explaining the widespread collusive petty tax administration corruption observed in developing countries.

This paper utilizes a positivist research framework and adopts a theoretical method of analysis, although secondary data will also be mentioned to support theoretical arguments whenever it is appropriate to do so.

A high rate of collusive tax corruption is inevitable in developing countries.

The model is static and needs to be extended into a dynamic model.

Traditional enforcement tools such as higher audits or a higher penalty regime against tax evasion do not work. Tax simplification can lessen the incidence of tax corruption.

Fighting tax corruption requires significant changes in the attitudes of taxpayers and tax auditors.

This paper combines the literature on Kantian economics and tax compliance in an innovative fashion.

An intractable effect of revenue and expense recognition based on tax regulation and accounting rules is unresolved and may be manageable only by reducing the value of deferred taxes. Therefore, in this study, the authors examined the relationship between the International Accounting Standard 12 (IAS 12) and deferred income taxes associated with tax and accounting rules.

The authors used a large sample of balanced data from 144 firms across 1992–2019. To mitigate the problem of superfluous results, the authors used the same number of firms and years for pre- and post-IAS 12 periods. The authors employed robust econometric estimations to establish the impact of IAS 12 on deferred tax.

The regression results show that deferred tax assets decreased significantly, whereas deferred tax liabilities increased significantly, in the post-IAS 12 period. These contrasting results imply that IAS 12 implementation has increased conservatism and prudence in financial reporting. However, the authors find that the increase in deferred tax assets post-IAS 12 is value destructive, suggesting that its implementation has unintended consequences. The results are robust to alternative measurements and econometric identification strategies.

While prior studies have explored topics such as deferred tax measurement and the impact of income and expense recognition, the authors specifically analyzed how IAS 12 affects deferred taxes and their effect on the market valuation. The authors find that certain accounting standards may not be relevant to the capital market.

The paper investigates if the process that led to the birth of the Euro Area had a significant impact in homogenizing the capital structure decisions of European firms since the first introduction of the common currency.

A large sample of firms was constructed, and a Tobit-censored regression model was utilized to investigate the determinants of firms' observed capital structures. The Black–Scholes–Merton model was used to infer market values of assets, as well as the volatility of those values, from the observed market values of equity and the corresponding volatility. The existing differences in national tax rules were considered for estimating firm-specific marginal tax rates.

It was found that, despite the currency union and the institutional harmonization process, certain factors still play a different role. In particular, the impact of profitability is consistent with the pecking order view in some countries, and with the trade-off theory in others. Assets risk, measured as the annualized volatility of the market enterprise value, is the best predictor of observed leverage ratios. The sector of activity is significant in determining leverage decisions even when assets' risk is taken into account. Despite the monetary union and the increased financial and institutional integration in the Euro Area, the country of origin still plays a significant role in capital structure decisions, suggesting that other country-level factors may affect firms' financing behaviour.

The paper indicates that, despite the long harmonization process of institutions, regulations and public budget required to join the Euro, firms' financing decisions are still affected by country-specific factors once the common currency is introduced. Therefore, new entrant countries in the Euro area should not expect their companies to immediately conform with those located in other countries within the common currency area.

This article investigated the impact of the currency change from national currencies to the Euro on the determinants of capital structure choices. It was shown that, despite the long harmonization process that led to the birth of the Euro Area, national factors still affect firms' financing decisions. This provides guidance for policymakers in countries that are planning to join the Euro about the impact this will have on firms' financing decisions in the entrant country.

This study aims to examine foreign direct investment (FDI) factors and develops a rational framework for FDI inflow in Western European countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Austria.

Data for this study were collected from the World development indicators (WDI) database from 1995 to 2018. Factors such as economic growth, pollution, trade, domestic capital investment, gross value-added and the financial stability of the country that influence FDI decisions were selected through empirical literature. A framework was developed using interpretable machine learning (IML), decision trees and three-stage least squares simultaneous equation methods for FDI inflow in Western Europe.

The findings of this study show that there is a difference between the most important and trusted factors for FDI inflow. Additionally, this study shows that machine learning (ML) models can perform better than conventional linear regression models.

This research has several limitations. Ideally, classification accuracies should be higher, and the current scope of this research is limited to examining the performance of FDI determinants within Western Europe.

Through this framework, the national government can understand how investors make their capital allocation decisions in their country. The framework developed in this study can help policymakers better understand the rationality of FDI inflows.

An IML framework has not been developed in prior studies to analyze FDI inflows. Additionally, the author demonstrates the applicability of the IML framework for estimating FDI inflows in Western Europe.