The Impact Of Media Coverage On Corporate Tax Avoidance

Taxes,as one of the main sources of finance for the government,are also an important financial expenditure for companies.On the one hand,in pursuit of the goal of profit maximization,companies want to spend less tax in order to produce more profit after tax,thus engaging in evading tax.On the other hand,in order to preserve the tax base,government regulatory authorities actively carry out anti-tax avoidance work,thus prompting the topic of corporate tax avoidance to become a hot spot of attention in both academic and practical circles.Most of the current studies which research factors of evading tax begin from the inside firm manage mechanism,and less scholars research this theme from the outside firm manage mechanism.Recently,media reporting has gradually turned into topical issues in academic circles.This article is based on the research methods of Tian Gaoliang(2016)and Liu Xiaoxia(2018),which are representative of the media coverage affecting corporate tax avoidance,and selects all A-share non-ST and non-financial insurance companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges during 2010-2018.The total number of media reports is used as the main explanatory variable,and media sentiment,corporate taxation aggressiveness and CEO gender are introduced as mediating variables to conduct empirical analysis and examine the governance effect of media reports on company evading tax.And on the basis of testing the governance effects of media coverage on company evading tax,we further examine whether media sentiment,tax aggressiveness and CEO gender have moderating effects on their governance effects.The stability of the model is also tested by combining group OLS regression,propensity score matching(PSM)and instrumental variable methods.The empirical results prove that: Firstly,media report has a governance effect on company evading tax.There is a significant negative correlation between media report and company evading tax.The more frequent the media report,the lower the degree of tax avoidance,the more they can inhibit corporate tax avoidance.Secondly,negative media emotion has a positive moderating influence on the connection between media report and company evading tax,which means that the more negative mood of media report is,the more reverse influence on media report on company evading tax.Thirdly,the aggressiveness of corporate taxation has a positive regulating effect on the connection between media report and company evading tax,and the reverse influence on media coverage is more pronounced in aggressive tax avoidance enterprises,and the higher the degree of tax aggressiveness,the more pronounced the inhibitory effect.Fourth,the relationship between media coverage and corporate tax avoidance is positively moderated when the CEO of the listed company is female.The interaction terms of media coverage and CEO gender are significantly negatively correlated with corporate tax avoidance,indicating that the inhibitory effect of media coverage on corporate tax avoidance is more significant when the listed company CEO is female.The findings of this paper not only enrich the literature in the field of media coverage and corporate tax avoidance,but also have implications for government tax supervision and corporate tax planning practice.