The Role of Managerial Ability in Corporate Tax Avoidance

Download or read book The Role of Managerial Ability in Corporate Tax Avoidance written by Allison Koester and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most prior studies model tax avoidance as a function of firm-level characteristics and do not consider how individual executive characteristics affect tax avoidance. This paper investigates whether executives with superior ability to efficiently manage corporate resources engage in greater tax avoidance. Our results show that moving from the lower to upper quartile of managerial ability is associated with a 3.15 (2.50) percent reduction in a firm's one-year (five-year) cash effective tax rate (ETR). We examine how higher ability managers reduce income tax payments and find they engage in greater state tax planning activities, shift more income to foreign tax havens, make more R&D credit claims, and make greater investments in assets that generate accelerated depreciation deductions. Identifying a manager characteristic related to firms' tax policy decisions adds to our understanding of the factors that explain the substantial variation in corporate income tax payments across firms.