Is there a relation between labor investment inefficiency and corporate tax avoidance?

Grantley Taylor, Ahmed Al-Hadi, Grant Richardson, Usamah Alfarhan and Khamis Al-Yahyaee

Economic Modelling, 2019, vol. 82, issue C, 185-201

Abstract: This paper investigates the relation between labor investment inefficiency and corporate tax avoidance. Employing a large sample of 61,542 U.S. firm-year observations over the 1962–2014 period, our regression results show that labor investment inefficiency is significantly positively related to tax avoidance. More specifically, we find that a one standard deviation of labor investment inefficiency leads to a 0.71% reduction in the accounting effective tax rate. Our findings are robust to endogeneity concerns, alternative proxy measures of tax avoidance and labor investment efficiency, and additional control variables pertaining to accounting quality and managerial ability. Taken together, our regression results show that labor investment inefficiency is an important determinant of corporate tax avoidance.

Keywords: Firm behavior; Labor investment inefficiency; Corporate tax avoidance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 G30 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:82:y:2019:i:c:p:185-201

DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2019.01.006

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