The Level Of Corporate Governance,Media Coverage And Corporate Tax Aggressiveness

The separation of ownership and management right makes the tax aggressiveness not a value-maximizing activity that managements strictly observe their duty,but reflecting insiders5 self-interested behaviors.Recently,scholars have calling on studies to investigate how to motivate and monitor managers to maximize shareholder wealth through tax aggressiveness from corporate governance perspective.The perfect corporate governance can effectively reduce the possibility of management to seek private interests and safeguard the interests of stakeholders.With the development of the Internet,the media is playing a more and more important role in our daily life,and it is regarded as an important external corporate governance power in the period of transition economy,which can effectively alleviate the problem of various agents.Owing to the institutional background in China’s different ultimate ownership firms may have different tax aggressiveness incentives which also offers a unique setting to investigate this issue.Based on the perspective of corporate governance,combined with the institutional background of China,it is very important to study how the level of corporate governance and the media coverage pay attention to the corporate tax aggressiveness.From the managers’ cost-benefit perspective,we build the level of corporate governance index using the principal component analysis method and take advantage of 8173 observations from A share listed firms in China from 2011 to 2015 to test the above research questions.Then the enterprise sample is split into the central state-owned enterprises,local state-owned enterprises and private enterprises to further test whether the effects of different ownership properties of different enterprises,finally studies the interaction between corporate governance and the media attention.The results show that the level of corporate governance and the corporate tax aggressiveness has inhibitory effect,and the inhibitory effect was significant only in private enterprises sample and not significant in the central state-owned enterprises or local state-owned enterprises.The improvement of media coverage also has an inhibitory effect on corporate tax aggressiveness,which is significant in the sample of central state-owned enterprises and private enterprises.There is substitution effect in the influence of the level of corporate governance and media coverage on corporate tax aggressiveness.This article from the enterprise initiative and external supervision two aspects of corporate tax aggressiveness for empirical research,supplement and expand the research of corporate tax aggressiveness from the perspective of corporate governance,has a certain theoretical and practical significance for the tax supervision and investor protection.Enterprises should speed up the optimization and perfection of corporate governance mechanism,so as to effectively restrain the management self interested behavior.The government should gradually reform the media market,give full play to the role of external governance to protect the interests of small investors.And according to the actual situation,taking into account the nature of the actual controller and the substitution effect between the two variables,we should adopt a reasonable method to restrain the corporate tax aggressiveness as effectively as possible.