Organizational structure and tax avoidance: Multinational evidence from business group affiliation

Abstract

We investigate the relation between business group affiliation and tax avoidance for publicly traded firms in a global setting. Overall, we find that publicly traded business group firms exhibit greater tax avoidance than stand-alone firms. This evidence is consistent with prior findings on Japan and Korea and suggests that the business group form allows ultimate owners to shift income between entities to lower their tax payments. However, we find that the effect is restricted to firms in countries with developed economies and with code law traditions. In emerging market, code law countries we do not observe a significant difference in tax avoidance, and in countries with common law systems we find that business group firms exhibit lower tax avoidance than stand-alone firms. Thus, our evidence suggests that the extent of a country’s economic development and legal origin combine to affect the ability of business groups to facilitate tax avoidance for public companies.