Quid pro quo? Local government debt and corporate tax avoidance

Abstract

This study examines the effect of local government debt (LGD) on corporate tax avoidance using a sample of Chinese-listed firms from 2007 to 2019. We find a negative relationship between LGD and tax avoidance only in the municipal state-owned enterprises (SOEs) controlled by the municipal government, suggesting that municipal officials focus on municipal SOEs to raise tax revenues to alleviate debt pressures. Further discussions show that the negative effect of LGD on municipal SOEs' tax avoidance is pronounced in politically connected managers, cities with worse fiscal situations and only present at the early phase of officials' tenure but insignificant later. We examine the economic consequences of politically driven tax planning and find that municipal SOEs with lower tax avoidance subsequently receive more government contracts as favor returns. Such favor exchange changes the distribution of current and future cash flows of the municipal SOEs, which are mainly determined by adjusting the composition of current accruals (i.e., more income-increasing earning management) and cash flow items (i.e., less tax avoidance). This study sheds light on the “two-way favor exchange” between governments and firms and provides implications for understanding local government leaders' heterogeneous incentives for tax enforcement and firms’ competing incentives for tax avoidance.