비상장기업의 조세회피와 미래 경영성과와의 관계

This study examines whether tax avoidance of unlisted firms affects the future operating performance. Unlike listed firms which trade their stocks to the general public, an unlisted firm is held privately by a small number of shareholders without separation of ownership and management. Consequently, unlisted firms have less capital market pressures due to a relatively small number of owners compared to listed firms. The low capital market pressure in turn would give unlisted firms more an incentive to avoid corporate tax at the expense of increasing financial reporting income than listed firms. Therefore, the common notion is that unlisted firms are more tax aggressive as they face lower non-tax costs of financial reporting (e.g. Cloyd, Pratt, and Stock 1996；Mills and Newberry 2001). For example, Cloyd et al. (1996) survey financial executives at listed and unlisted firms and confirm that listed firm managers are less likely to select conforming tax strategies than unlisted firm managers. Mills and Newberry (2001) extend Cloyd et al. (1996) by investigating the book-tax income differences of listed and unlisted firms. Although tax avoidance of listed firms is frequently discussed in previous studies, but tax avoidance of unlisted firms is almost lack. To fill this gap, this paper provides empirical evidence on the relations between the tax avoidance of unlisted firms and the future operating performance. There are two alternative theories on the effect of corporate tax avoidance on firm value. In the conventional perspective, tax avoidance activities is considered to increase firm value, because it increases both net income and cash flows. However, agency theory argues that corporate tax avoidance destroys firm value, since it increases firm’s opacity and thus facilitates managerial opportunistic behaviors and rent extraction from shareholders. Then, this study examine the extent to which tax avoidance of unlisted firms affects subsequent operating performance. To investigate the addressed research question, this study estimate five-year cumulative GAAP-based effective tax rate (GAAP ETR) and five-year cumulative cash effective tax rate (CASH ETR) following Dyreng et al.(2008). And following Lee (2010), who also analyze future firm’s ROA and CFO, this paper include controls for ROA, firm size, growth opportunities, and leverage level and in this analysis as these variables are correlated both with future profitability. The final sample consists of 42,430 firm-years from unlisted firms based audited by an external auditor and non-financial firms with fiscal month of December between 2004 and 2013. This paper findings are as follows. After controlling for several factors that affect future profitability, this study finds that tax avoidance of past affects a negative effect on the future operating performance (industry-adjusted ROA or CFO) in the next and two subsequent years. This is, tax avoidance of unlisted firms are related negatively to their future performance. This results implies tax avoidance of unlisted firms is likely to be from opportunistic behavior or rent extraction of managers frequently discussed in the listed firms. This study contributes to the related literature as this is the first study which investigates the relations between tax avoidance and future operating performance of unlisted firms. Therefore, the findings of this paper can shed a further light to potential creditors who make investment decision on unlisted firms as well as regulatory bodies by providing useful insight on the unlisted firms, which seems to result in the negative relations between tax avoidance and future performance.