법인세율 인하에 따른 이익조정 행태에 관한 실증연구

Corporations manage incomes for book or tax purposes. We analyze taxable income management but uses book income management variables. Corporations would defer current taxable income to the subsequent period when they expect the statutory tax rate reduction. Lower taxable income causes lower book income as book-tax conformity is very high in Korea. Lower book income is a serious non-tax cost for corporate tax saving strategy. Thus, corporation would not reduce the taxable income to the degree of overall book income decrease. Instead they would try to decrease taxable income without affecting book income, although there not many means available. If they could do so, the book-tax difference would get higher. Book-tax difference would be measured by deferred tax. Another choice of saving tax with minimum impact on book income is the reduction of both book and taxable income but incurring losses on nonoperating or extraordinary items, instead of operating items, on the income statement. Gain or loss from fixed assets disposal is a frequently used variable to measure such a behavior in the prior studies. This study uses three dependent variables to measure the degree of tax savings: Discretionary accruals, deferred tax and gain or loss from fixed assets disposal. Tax saving behavior is hypothesized to occur in 2001 and 2004, when corporations expected the statutory corporate tax rate reduction by 1% and 2% respectively in the subsequent years. Discretionary accruals do not decrease in the years prior to tax rate reduction. It implies that corporations do not reduce overall book income to save tax. Both deferred tax assets (liabilities) and gain (loss) from fixed assets disposal show decreases (increases) in the years prior to tax rate reduction. It implies that corporations save tax by either keeping their book income intact or affecting only the parts of book income from non-operating activities.