소유지배괴리도가 조세회피와 기업가치의 관계에 미치는 영향

Abstract

his study examines the effect of wedge between voting right and cash flow right(WEDGE) on the relationship between tax avoidance and firm value. There are two alternative views on the effect of corporate tax avoidance on firm value. Traditionally, corporate tax avoidance is considered a value enhancing activities, because it decreases cash outflows and thus increase after-tax cash flows, net assets and financial slack of a firm. This view implicitly assumes that the costs of tax avoidance are less important and specifically, indirect costs are insignificant. However, agency view argues that corporate tax avoidance destroys firm value, since it increases firm's opacity and thus facilitates managerial opportunistic behaviors. From the agency view, there are potential agency costs in the form of rent extraction by managers, reputational costs, and corporate transparency problem. These non-tax costs may offset the increasing value of corporate tax avoidance. Prior research has expected to enhance firm value by tax avoidance under the traditional view; however, from the agency view, the non-tax costs have increased and they have a detrimental impact on firm value in the recent research. Korean corporate governance practice are characterized by the dominance of large business group, so called Chaebol. In developing countries such as Korea, the agency problem between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders occurs more frequently than between shareholders and managers which is considered traditional agency problem. Also, the large business group in Korea normally have pyramidal structure and cross-shareholdings which enable controlling shareholders to control the entire companies belonging to the large business group even with only a small percentage of direct ownership. As the WEDGE increases, controlling shareholders have an incentive to pursue their private interests by transferring wealth from minority shareholders to themselves. These kind of bebavior of the controlling shareholders can influence on the relationship between tax avoidance and firm value. This study defined tax avoidance as the reduction of explicit tax payments over time through all means of income reported to shareholders (Dyreng et al.2008). This stuy uses long-run CASH ETR as a measure of tax avoidance. Long-run CASH ETR measured by total cash taxes paid summed over three years(or five years), scaled by pretax income summed over three years(or five years). This stuy adjusted long-run CASH ETR multiplied (-1). This study uses Tobin's Q as a measure of firm value. The sample consists of Korean firms that belong to large business group over the period 2001-2011. The sample size is 436 firm-year observations for three-year CASH ETR. The ownership data are publicly available, disclosed by Online Provision of Enterprises Informaton System(OPNI) of the Fair Trade Commission. Tax paid data are collected from Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System(DART) provided by Financial Supervisory Service in Korea. Other control variable are retrieved from KIS-VALUE LIBRARY database. The results are as follows. The result shows the negative effect of tax avoidance on firm value increases as the WEDGE increases. This result might be because controlling shareholders are better able to exploit external shareholders as WEDGE greater. It is implying that controlling shareholders use tax avoidance as a device of temporary opportunism. This study contributes to the literature by providing evidence that firms’ governance characteristics represented by the WEDGE affect the relationship between tax avoidance and firm value.