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This study examines the impact of profitability, firm size and leverage on corporate tax avoidance in Bangladesh, an emerging South Asian economy.

A balanced panel data of 62 firms from Dhaka and Chittagong stock exchanges in Bangladesh from 2009 to 2020 were used to run the regression. This study employed the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) to examine the hypotheses.

The findings show that large firms positively impact corporate tax avoidance. Similarly, profitability and leverage are positively associated with tax avoidance, and the results are significant. Furthermore, the study conducts robustness tests that confirm the findings.

The use of cash effective tax rate (ETR) to investigate firms’ tax avoidance practices poses some limitations, and the results should be interpreted cautiously.

The current study may help policymakers better enhance tax collection from business firms. The findings could serve as a valuable input for effectively monitoring tax collection from large profit-earning firms.

To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first historical attempt in Bangladesh to use panel data to examine the relationship between the firm’s level characteristics and corporate tax avoidance. Panel data often provides greater flexibility with large data, simplifying calculation and statistical analysis.

This paper aims to examine the impact of Zakat avoidance on firm value and investigates how board characteristics moderate this relationship within the context of Saudi Arabia, a Muslim nation.

Using panel data from 2009 to 2020, encompassing 78 nonfinancial firms listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange, this study constructs an enhanced measure of Zakat avoidance that integrates insights from tax avoidance research, Shariah principles and the regulations of the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority. This research uses empirical techniques, including panel data regressions and interaction analysis to investigate how board characteristics may influence this relationship.

Descriptive analysis reveals pervasive Zakat compliance, underscoring the effectiveness of Saudi Arabia’s robust Zakat system. Regression results indicate a positive association between Zakat payment and firm value. Remarkably, board characteristics exhibit no significant link to Zakat avoidance, emphasizing the potency of the Zakat system and religious adherence. However, the moderation analysis reveals that board independence and meeting frequency positively moderate the relationship between Zakat avoidance and firm value.

The study emphasizes the vital importance of upholding Zakat obligations to cultivate trust among stakeholders and amplify firm value. It advocates for governance frameworks that foster vigilant oversight and independence, ultimately enhancing a firm’s overall worth. Furthermore, the study’s findings provide valuable insights for corporate leaders, investors, policymakers and society as a whole, facilitating the promotion of ethical financial conduct and driving holistic economic development.

This research introduces novel insights by scrutinizing the intricate interplay of Zakat avoidance, board dynamics and firm value within the context of a culturally distinctive emerging economy. The development of a distinct Zakat avoidance metric, along with comprehensive empirical assessment, contributes to the originality of the study. Moreover, the investigation into the moderating influence of board characteristics adds value to the existing body of knowledge.

The role of chief executive officer (CEO) personal characteristics in shaping corporate policies has attracted increasing academic attention in the past two decades. In this review, the authors synthesize extant research on CEO attributes by reviewing 232 articles published in 29 journals from the accounting, finance and management literature. This review provides an overview of existing findings, highlights current trends and interdisciplinary differences in research approaches and identifies potential avenues for future research.

To review the literature on CEO attributes, the authors manually collected peer-reviewed articles in accounting, finance and management journals from 2000 to 2021. The authors conducted in-depth analysis of each paper and manually recorded the theories, data sources, country of study, study period, measures of CEO attributes and dependent variables. This procedure helped the authors group the selected articles into themes and sub-themes. The authors compared the findings in various disciplines and provided direction for future research.

The authors highlight the role of CEO personal attributes in influencing corporate decision-making and firm outcomes. The authors categorize studies of CEO traits into three main research themes: (1) demographic attributes and experience (including age, gender, culture, experience, education); (2) CEO interactions with others (social and political networks) and (3) underlying attributes (including personality, values and ideology). The evidence shows that CEO characteristics significantly affect a wide range of specific corporate policies that serve as mechanisms through which individual CEOs determine firm success and performance.

CEO selection is one of the most crucial decisions made by corporations. The study findings provide valuable insights to corporate executives, boards, investors and practitioners into how CEOs’ personal characteristics can impact future firm decisions and outcomes that can, in turn, inform the high-stake process of CEO recruitment and selection. The study findings have significant practical implications for corporations, such as contributing to executive training programs, to assist executives and directors attain a greater level of self-awareness.

Building on the theoretical foundation of upper echelons theory, the authors offer an integrated theoretical framework to consolidate existing empirical research on the impacts of CEO personal attributes on firm outcomes across accounting and finance (A&F) and management literature. The study findings provide a roadmap for scholars to bridge the interdisciplinary divide between A&F and management research. The authors advocate a more holistic and multifaceted approach to examining CEOs, each of whom embodies a myriad of personal characteristics that comprise their unique identity. The study findings encourage future researchers to expand the investigation of the boundary conditions that magnify or moderate the impacts of CEO idiosyncrasies.

This paper examines the moderating effect of good corporate governance on the association between internal information quality and tax savings.

This study uses a quantitative approach. It employs an Australian sample of analysis composed of 1,295 firm-year observations from the period 2017 to 2021. Data relating to corporate governance are hand-collected from the annual reports.

Based on the result of the analysis, this study demonstrates that the interaction between corporate governance and quality of internal information is positively associated with tax savings. Superior corporate governance is critical in activating the effect of internal information quality on tax savings. This finding is robust to a battery of robustness checks and additional tests.

This examination utilizes only publicly traded companies from one developed country.

For the company management, an effective governance structure must be at the top because it will determine the development of all other areas. This study emphasizes the need to continuously improve the effectiveness of corporate governance practices. For long-term investors, an important indicator that can be considered in assessing the “safety” of a company’s tax strategy is its corporate governance aspects. For regulators, this study is expected to assist regulators in creating a more adequate corporate governance implementation and disclosure package to be implemented by corporations in the future.

This study provides new evidence on a crucial construct that can strengthen the relationship between internal information quality and tax savings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how variations in management’s tone within management’s discussion and analysis (MD&A) sections of 10-K reports can serve as an indicator of tax avoidance and highlight the complex relationship between such linguistic shifts and the tax avoidance decisions within firms.

The paper uses a textual analysis approach to identify linguistic cues in MD&A sections of 10-K filings related to tax avoidance, going beyond traditional quantitative measures. The study uses differences in negative word occurrences in MD&A to measure management’s tone change and examines various measures of tax avoidance. The sample covers the period from 1993 to 2017 and comprises all firms with 10-K filings available on EDGAR, totaling over 30,000 firm-year observations.

The findings indicate a complementary relationship between tax avoidance and other drivers of firm performance. When firms have more negative management’s tone, they are less willing to engage in tax avoidance and vice versa. The study’s approach with management’s tone change provides a different and statistically significant improvement in model fit for detecting tax avoidance.

This paper provides actionable insights for detecting tax avoidance through the analysis of management’s tone in corporate disclosures, offering a new tool for researchers, investors and tax authorities. It highlights the importance of linguistic cues as indicators of tax avoidance behavior, complementing traditional financial metrics.

The paper contributes to the literature by using management’s tone change as a time-varying factor to explain tax avoidance behavior. It uncovers a larger set of linguistic cues in MD&A that can be used to detect tax avoidance. This research provides a complementary approach to traditional quantitative tax avoidance measures and offers insights into the overall relationship between tax avoidance and firm performance, going beyond one-dimensional measures typically used in prior literature.

Corporate digital transformation (CDT) has challenged traditional tax administration systems. This study examines the impact of CDT on tax avoidance behavior and tests whether tax authorities can identify this behavior.

Using data on listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2008 to 2020, this study applies the Heckman two-stage and cross-section models.

The results show that the higher the degree of CDT, the more aggressive the tax avoidance behavior. The CDT's impact on corporate tax avoidance is more significant under strong government tax efforts.

This study expands research on the economic consequences of CDT and the factors influencing corporate tax avoidance behavior. Moreover, it has important implications for governments to monitor tax avoidance behavior under the CDT, improve digital tax systems, and pay more attention to the tax administration of digital assets.

Research on the organizational ramifications of chief executive officer (CEO) greed remains scarce. This study intends to fill this gap by examining the impact of CEO greed on an important yet risky corporate strategy, corporate tax avoidance (CTA). Drawing on upper echelons theory, the authors argue that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA. The relationship is weaker when CEOs experienced economic recessions in their early career and stronger when CEOs are endowed with equity ownership of their respective firms.

The authors test the hypotheses with data from US public firms from 1997 to 2008 and employ the ordinary least square regression analysis to analyze the hypothesized relationships. The authors also test the robustness of the results by performing the two-stage least square regression and propensity score matching analyses.

The findings lend broad support to all the hypotheses. The authors find that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA by paying lower corporate taxes. The impact of greed on CTA is attenuated when CEOs are recession CEOs and is exacerbated when CEOs own large numbers of firm shares.

This paper contributes to the upper echelons research by investigating a novel executive personal characteristic, greed, and its negative impact on an important organizational outcome. This paper also contributes to the growing tax research that recognizes the important role executives play in shaping corporate tax strategies.

The authors examine the role of CEO political ideology in the credit rating process.

This study adopts a quantitative method with panel data regressions using a sample of 5,211 observations from S&P 500 firms from 2001 to 2012.

The authors find that firms run by Republican-leaning CEOs, who tend to have conservative political ideologies, enjoy more favorable credit ratings than firms run by Democratic-leaning CEOs. In addition, the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings is more pronounced for firms with high operating uncertainty, low capital intensity, high growth potential, weak corporate governance and low financial reporting quality. Finally, the authors find that CEO political ideology affects a firm's cost of debt incremental to credit ratings, consistent with debt investors incorporating CEO political ideology in their pricing decisions.

Leveraging CEO political ideology, the authors document that credit rating agencies incorporate managerial conservatism in their credit rating decisions. This finding suggests that CEO political ideology serves as a meaningful signal for managerial conservatism.

The study suggests that credit rating agencies incorporate CEO political ideology in their credit rating process. Other capital market participants such as auditors and retail investors can also use CEO political ideology as a proxy for managerial conservatism when evaluating firms.

The paper carries practical implications for practitioners, firm executives and regulators. The results on the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings suggest that other financial institutions could also incorporate CEO political ideology in their evaluation in their evaluation of firms. For example, when evaluating audit risk and determining audit pricing, auditors may add CEO political ideology as a risk factor. For firms, especially those that have Democratic-leaning CEOs, the authors suggest that they could reduce the unfavorable effect of CEO political ideology on credit ratings by improving their corporate governance and financial reporting quality, as demonstrated in the cross-sectional analyses. Finally, this study shows that CEO political ideology, as measured by CEOs' political contributions, is closely related to a firm's credit ratings. This finding may inform regulators that greater transparency for CEOs' political contributions is needed as information on contributions could help capital market participants perform risk analyses for firms.

Credit rating agencies release their research methodologies for determining corporate credit ratings and identify managerial conservatism as an important factor that affects their risk assessments. The extant literature, however, has not empirically investigated the relation between credit ratings and managerial conservatism, which, according to behavioral consistency theory, can be proxied by CEO political ideology. This study provides novel empirical evidence that identifies CEO political ideology as an important input factor in the credit rating process.

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.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of industry specialization of audit partners and audit committee members on the level of tax avoidance in Australian banks.

This study uses a multivariate regression analysis based on hand-collected data consisting of 180 observations from Australian domestic banks between 2010 and 2018.

The primary results of the empirical analysis indicate that audit partner industry specialization is negatively associated with the level of tax avoidance in Australian banks. Regarding the audit committee, the proportion of industry specialists among audit committee members reduces the magnitude of tax avoidance. These results are robust, as they hold the same for alternative measures of tax avoidance and industry specialization of audit partner and audit committee members. Results from supplementary analysis reveal that the interactive effect of both audit firm and audit partner industry specialization strengthens the auditors’ effectiveness in reducing the level of tax avoidance.

As this study highlights the importance of the industry specialization in decreasing tax avoidance, it can be beneficial for policymakers to assess the impact of good governance on the level of tax avoidance in the banking industry.

Even though the existing studies examine the link between the governance actors’ industry specialization and tax avoidance in nonfinancial firms, this paper explores the banking industry that differs from nonfinancial firms in among others; accounting and fiscal regulations. This study further provides unique evidence indicating that industry specialization of the audit partner constitutes a significant determinant of minimizing the bank’s level of tax avoidance.