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This study aims to focus on the five most relevant and discursive emerging technologies in accounting (cloud computing, big data and data analytics, blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics process automation [RPA]). It investigates the adoption and use of these technologies based on data collected from accounting professionals in a technology-developed country – Canada, through a survey.

The study investigates the adoption and use of emerging technologies based on data collected from accounting professionals in a technology-developed country – Canada, through a survey. This study considers the said nature and characteristics of emerging technologies and proposes a model using the factors that have been found to be significant and most commonly investigated by existing prior technology-organization-environment (TOE)-related technology adoption studies. This survey applies the TOE framework and examines the influence of significant and most commonly known factors on Canadian firms’ intention to adopt the said emerging technologies.

Study results indicate that Canadian accounting professionals’ self-assessed knowledge (about these emerging technologies) is more theoretical than operational. Cloud computing is highly used by Canadian firms, while the use of other technologies, particularly blockchain and RPA, is reportedly low. However, firms’ intention about the future adoption of these technologies seems positive. Study results reveal that only the relative advantage and top management commitment are found to be significant considerations influencing the adoption intention.

Study findings confirm some results presented in earlier studies but provide additional insights from a new perspective, that of accounting professionals in Canada. The first limitation relates to the respondents. Although accounting professionals provided valuable insights, their responses are personal views and do not necessarily represent the views of other professionals within the same firm or the official position of their accounting departments or firms. Therefore, the exclusion of diverse viewpoints from the same firm might have negatively impacted the results of this study. Second, this study sample is limited to Canada-based firms, which means that the study reflects only the situation in that country. Third, considering the research method and the limit on the number of questions the authors could ask, respondents were only asked to rate the impact of these five technologies on the accounting field and to clarify which technologies are used.

This study’s findings confirm that the organizational intention to adopt new technology is not primarily based on the characteristics of the technology. In the case of emerging technology adoption, the decision also depends upon other factors related to the internal organization. Furthermore, although this study found no support for the effect of environmental factors, it fills a gap in the literature by including the factor of vendor support, which has received little attention in prior information technology (IT)/ information system (IS) adoption research. Moreover, in contrast to most prior adoption studies, this study elaborates on accounting professionals’ experience and perceptions in investigating the organizational adoption and use of emerging technologies. Thus, the findings of this study are valuable, providing insights from a new perspective, that of professional accountants.

The study findings may serve as a guide for researchers, practitioners, firms and other stakeholders, particularly technology providers, interested in learning about emerging technologies’ adoption and use in Canada and/or in a relevant context. Contrary to most prior adoption studies, this study elaborates on accounting professionals’ experience and perceptions in investigating the organizational adoption and use of emerging technologies. Thus, the findings of this study are valuable, providing insights from a new perspective, that of professional accountants.

The study provides insights into the said technologies’ actual adoption and improves the awareness of firms and stakeholders to the effect of some constructs that influence the adoption of these emerging technologies in accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between tax avoidance and earnings persistence in the light of a developing economy, with the main focus on China.

In the analysis, the author conducts a survey on the tax avoidance situation of Chinese listed companies from 2012 to 2020. Then, a multivariate regression analysis is performed in order to analyse the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and earnings persistence.

The findings of the present study show that tax avoidance has a significant positive effect on earnings persistence. However, when the degree of tax avoidance is high, the “risk effect” of tax avoidance exceeds the “value effect”, and tax avoidance will reduce the persistence of earnings. This conclusion is even more prominent when the company is non-state-owned. Further research shows the increase of institutional investors’ shareholding ratio can improve “value effect” of tax avoidance, lessen “risk effect” of tax avoidance, and positively affect the relationship between tax avoidance and earnings persistence.

This study provides evidence for investors to understand the dual effect of tax avoidance on earnings persistence. The results may have implications for regulatory bodies. They can provide a better understanding of the corporate governance role of institutional investors in curbing opportunistic tax avoidance.

This study enriches the research on tax avoidance effects by analysing the impact of tax avoidance on earnings persistence. This study also compensates for the shortcomings of analysing earnings persistence mainly from the perspective of tax differences in the past, and promotes the study of the corporate governance effects of institutional investors under different levels of tax avoidance.

This study examines the effect of local government debt (LGD) on corporate earnings management using 25,624 firm-year observations from 2007 to 2019.

Pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is used to examine the impact of LGD on earnings management. A difference-in-differences (DID) method is also used to alleviate potential endogeneity.

Results show that LGD motivates firms to increase earnings management, especially income-decreasing earnings management. Findings are robust to DID method and robustness tests. Heterogeneity analyses show that the positive effect of LGD on earnings management is pronounced in firms with political dependence and moderated by external governance mechanisms. Further discussions indicate that tax enforcement is an underlying channel for LGD to affect earnings management. Firms engage in downward real earnings management by increasing their abnormal discretionary expenditures and higher LGD leads to a greater book-tax difference in those firms that manipulate income-decreasing earnings management.

This study contributes towards examining the political costs hypothesis, the microeconomic effects of LGD and the determinants of earnings management.

This study aims to propose a new conforming tax measure based on the work of Badertscher et al. (2019).

This study divides total tax avoidance/management (TM) into nonconforming and conforming portions through a regression. The residual of the regression is treated as the conforming tax measure. In addition, the new conforming tax measure is validated via three approaches. Then, this study examines the moderating effect of nonconforming earnings management (EM) on the relationship between conforming TM and firm performance.

The empirical results show that the model has stronger explanatory power than the model proposed by Badertscher et al. (2019). Additionally, the validation results show that the mean value of the conforming tax measure is lower in quasi-private corporations (financially constrained companies) than in matched public corporations (nonfinancially constrained companies), and firms under high market capital pressure are less motivated to engage in conforming tax practices. Furthermore, nonconforming EM positively moderates the conforming tax–ROA association, implying that nonconforming EM can reduce financial reporting costs resulting from conforming tax practices.

This study contributes to conforming tax research in the following ways. First, this study proposes a new conforming tax measure by substituting the cash book tax difference (BTD) for the BTD in the model of Badertscher et al. (2019) (“BKRW”). Second, this study demonstrates theoretically why the cash BTD should outperform the BTD in computing the BKRW conforming tax measure and confirm this empirically. Third, this study presents a three-way conceptual schema that divides corporations into two groups along each of three tax-relevant dimensions. The group of firms that use both conforming and nonconforming tax strategies have different characteristics compared to the other group. This study also validates the conforming tax measure across the two-group dichotomies.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and the moderating effect of financial constraints on the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and ESG performance.

The sample consists of a global data set involving 24,259 firm-year observations from 49 countries for the years 2011–2020. Corporate ESG performance was extracted from the Thomson Reuters database. The book-tax difference model was used for measuring corporate tax avoidance, while financially constrained firms were identified using the Kaplan and Zingales (1997) index.

The results show that firms with higher tax avoidance are associated with higher ESG performance, but lower ESG performance is shown for firms with higher financial constraints. The results further indicate that the positive impact of corporate tax avoidance on ESG performance becomes weaker for firms with higher financial constraints.

The findings imply that policymakers and regulators should focus on mechanisms to promote more internal funds to assist firms in pursuing ESG-related initiatives, such as through tax incentives. Investors should understand the “smokescreen” effect of corporate tax avoidance on ESG performance, especially for firms with financial constraints.

This analysis provides international evidence on the link between tax avoidance and ESG and considers the joint effect of pressures for internal funds, through tax and financing constraints, on corporate ESG performance.

This paper examines the relationship between tax avoidance and accounting comparability. The authors argue that aggressive tax behavior impairs the comparability of financial statements by altering the accounting function, which maps economic events into accounting data.

The empirical analysis is based on a large sample of United States (US) firms. The authors use raw and industry-adjusted effective tax rates (ETRs) to proxy tax avoidance. The authors use the measure of accounting comparability developed by De Franco et al. (2011), which aims to capture the similarity of the accounting function.

The authors find that firms with more aggressive tax avoidance strategies have substantially lower accounting comparability. The evidence also shows that the negative effect of tax avoidance on accounting comparability is driven by firms with aggressive tax planning strategies beyond the industry norm. Furthermore, using an alternative measure of accounting comparability as a function of pre-tax income, the authors continue to find evidence of the negative effect of tax avoidance behavior. Importantly, this provides evidence that the effect of aggressive tax planning is not limited to the reported tax expense, but affects the comparability of the overall financial reporting system.

The authors identify a new potential cost of tax aggressive activities, being the loss of accounting comparability as driven by tax aggressive activities. The results contribute to the literature on the costs of tax avoidance and on the determinants of accounting comparability.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and stock price crash risk and the moderating effects of corporate governance.

This study investigates the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and stock price crash risk using the sample consisting of listed firms in Vietnam for the period of 2011–2020 using panel regressions.

The authors find that there is a positive relationship between tax avoidance and stock price crash risk. Foreign ownership weakens the impacts of tax avoidance on stock price crash risk, while managerial ownership strengthens the impacts. Female Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and female chairpersons weaken this relationship. Board gender diversity and state ownership have insignificant moderating impacts.

These findings could help the stock market build better internal monitoring mechanisms to reduce the impacts of tax avoidance on future stock price crash risk. Investors can recognize the characteristics of corporate governance, especially foreign ownership, managerial ownership, female CEOs and female chairpersons when making investment decisions. The policy makers should consider policies to attract foreign investment and support women entrepreneurship.

This paper contributes to the literature on the impacts of tax avoidance on stock price crash risk in emerging countries. This paper is the first to investigate the influence of corporate governance mechanisms including state ownership, foreign ownership, female CEOs and chairpersons and board gender diversity on this relationship.

This paper aims to examine the influence of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on corporate tax avoidance (CTA). In addition, this study aims to explore whether family ownership moderates the impact of IFRS adoption on CTA.

The authors used a sample of 1,856 firms from various countries around the world, covering the period between 2010 and 2022. To estimate the proposed econometric models, the authors applied both fixed and random effects regression methods.

The present findings show that IFRS adoption has a negative impact on CTA, as measured by the effective tax rate and book-tax differences. This negative impact is more pronounced in “common law” countries than in “civil law countries.” Additionally, the authors found that family ownership plays a moderating role by positively affecting the impact of IFRS adoption on CTA.

The findings have practical, regulatory and academic implications for fostering accountability and fairness in taxation. This study suggests that implementing IFRS reduces tax avoidance and emphasizes the need for firms to evaluate the implications of IFRS adoption on their tax-planning strategies. It highlights the importance of aligning financial reporting practices with international standards to enhance transparency and minimize tax avoidance opportunities. The differential impact of IFRS adoption between “common law” and “civil law” countries underscores the role of legal and regulatory frameworks. In addition, family ownership plays a significant role in shaping tax-planning strategies. From an academic perspective, this research provides a foundation for further exploration into the relationship between IFRS adoption and tax avoidance.

The existing literature has predominantly concentrated on examining the effect of IFRS adoption on CTA, and the empirical findings have been inconsistent. This study introduces a novel perspective by considering the moderating influence of family ownership in determining the impact of IFRS adoption on CTA.

This paper aims to study the impact of tax avoidance on corporate risk. It also examines the moderating impact of tax risk on the relationship between tax avoidance and firm risk.

Based on available information in the DATASTREAM database about a sample of French firms listed in the CAC 40 from 2010 to 2022, the study uses the feasible generalized least squares method to investigate the impact of tax avoidance on firm risk and the moderating impact of tax risk. To check the robustness of our results, the authors changed the measurement of variables to identify potential biases and they significantly mitigated the endogeneity concerns using instrumental variable regression. Additional estimations were performed, first by using book-tax differences (BTD) and its components, i.e. temporary and permanent, and second by retesting hypotheses of years before the outbreak of the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The results show that tax avoidance negatively affects the firm risk while tax risk has a positive effect on firm risk. More importantly, tax risk moderates the negative impact of tax avoidance on the firm risk. When tax avoidance is associated with a high level of tax risk, it leads to a high firm risk. Accordingly, tax avoidance should be considered in conjunction with tax risk when studying the effect put on the firm risk. Further analyses indicate that tax risk moderates the negative relationship between permanent BTD and firm risk.

The major limitation of this study is that it focuses only on French-listed firms, which make it difficult to generalize the results. Furthermore, the authors did not introduce governance variables into our models. An effective governance system and transparent information can reduce some of the perverse effects of risky tax avoidance by reducing the tax avoidance costs. The obtained results are of great interest to researchers who need to include the tax risk concept in their examination of the tax avoidance impacts.

The results are useful for investors wishing to make sound decisions regarding risky tax avoidance practices. Furthermore, the results may signal the need for French policymakers to make more efforts to reduce risky tax avoidance activities that are harmful to investors. They must enforce the existence and the reporting of a tax risk management strategy by firms.

This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the tax avoidance effects with a special focus on firm risk. This study provides the first French evidence of the role of tax risk in the relationship between tax avoidance and firm risk.

This paper aims to study the impact of the adoption of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) on corporate tax avoidance.

This paper used a quantitative method with panel data regression models using a sample of firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2018.

The regression results demonstrate that XBRL implementation does not have any impact on corporate tax avoidance. The results indicate that tax avoidance is not reduced following XBRL adoption. This report shows unexpected and unfavourable outcomes of XBRL financial reporting in a developing country.

This study employs a sample of firms from one emerging country only.

The study proposes several implications for using XBRL in tax reporting, which may help the tax authorities reduce tax avoidance. Regulators need to develop adequate taxonomies with standardized extensions related to tax information in the XBRL format. They include tax tags from financial statements and tax tags from the disclosure section, to gain more comprehensive corporate tax information.

This study proposes and tests an explanation for the effect of XBRL adoption on corporate tax avoidance in the context of a developing country.