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Management Compensation, Monitoring and Aggressive Corporate Tax Planning

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  • Melanie Steinhoff

Abstract

The empirical literature shows that management incentives often reduce corporate tax aggressiveness. Focussing on the riskiness of tax aggressiveness this paper offers one explanation for the observed negative relation. Using an agency framework, I analyze the manager's choice of effort dedication in other tasks and her explicit choice of the firm's tax risk. I show that corporate tax aggressiveness may decrease with compensation incentives. By choosing the tax risk, the manager (partly) determines her compensation risk. When the manager is assumed to be risk averse, an increase in compensation incentives motivates her to reduce her compensation risk through a less aggressive tax planning strategy. Further, a good governance structure may mitigate this effect of incentive compensation when marginal returns for tax planning are sufficiently low. I also demonstrate that the tax deductibility of performance-based pay yields less aggressive tax planning.

Suggested Citation

  • Melanie Steinhoff, 2015. "Management Compensation, Monitoring and Aggressive Corporate Tax Planning," CQE Working Papers 4115, Center for Quantitative Economics (CQE), University of Muenster.
    • Handle: RePEc:cqe:wpaper:4115
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    File URL: https://www.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/cqe/sites/cqe/files/CQE_Paper/CQE_WP_41_2015.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    2. Ralf Ewert & Rainer Niemann, 2014. "A Theory of Tax Avoidance - Managerial Incentives for Tax Planning in a Multi-Task Principal-Agent Model," CESifo Working Paper Series 4851, CESifo.
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    6. Armstrong, Christopher S. & Blouin, Jennifer L. & Jagolinzer, Alan D. & Larcker, David F., 2015. "Corporate governance, incentives, and tax avoidance," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 1-17.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    management incentives; hidden action; corporate tax planning;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory

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