Management compensation, monitoring and aggressive corporate tax planning

Melanie Steinhoff

No 83, CAWM Discussion Papers from University of Münster, Münster Center for Economic Policy (MEP)

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 ciently low. I also demonstrate that the tax deductibility of performance-based pay yields less aggressive tax planning.

Keywords: management incentives; hidden action; corporate tax planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D82 H25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-pbe and nep-pub
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cawmdp:83

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