Corporate value added tax avoidance
本文研究中国企业的增值税避税行为，发现增值税避税与企业所得税避税存在互补关系，且增值税避税会降低企业价值，表明仅关注所得税会低估企业避税程度。
Previous studies of corporate tax avoidance have focused exclusively on corporate income tax, an important tax for US firms in particular. Value added tax (VAT), which is a significant tax in other major economies in the world, is ignored in the literature. This paper examines corporate VAT avoidance behaviour in the context of China, where both corporate income tax and VAT are critical for firms. We develop a measure of corporate VAT avoidance and, using simultaneous equation regression, we find a complementary relationship between corporate income tax avoidance and VAT avoidance. This indicates that traditional studies that limit their focus to income tax may have underestimated the magnitude of firms’ tax avoidance. The negative effect of VAT avoidance on firm value supports extant arguments in the literature that the opaqueness caused by tax avoidance increase the agency cost between shareholders and managers.