Digital Transformation and Dynamic Adjustment of Corporate Tax Burden
WANG Liangliang, QI Yuanyuan, ZHANG Haiyang, XU Xingmei
School of Economics and Management, Southeast University; International College (Suzhou Research Institute), Renmin University of China; Suzhou Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Soclal Governance Technologies, Renmin University of China
Summary:
The trade-off theory implies that firms have target levels of tax burden. Firms will adjust towards target level of tax burden when the current level of tax burden deviates from the target level. The research on the dynamic adjustment of the level of tax burden has just started and it is urgent for scholars to carry out in-depth research. The digital transformation of firms has brought about the deep integration of digital technology and strategy, which is very important for firms' high-quality development. Chinese government attaches great importance to the digital transformation of the firm and has repeatedly emphasized and called on the promotion of digital construction of all walks of life in the Government Work Reports in 2021. Under the background of the rapid development of digital economy, a lot of research has been carried out. Previous studies have shown that the digital transformation will change the management model, efficiency, and effect of firms by improving the efficiency of information management and reducing the organizational coordination cost. As an important segment and organic component of firm tax administration, the dynamic adjustment of firm-level tax burden is also highly dependent on information management efficiency and organizational coordination. Because the digital transformation can not only improve the efficiency of information management, but also reduce the cost of coordination, it will inevitably affect the formulation and implementation of firm's tax burden adjustment strategies, and then affect the adjustment speed towards the target level of tax burden. Regrettably, few studies have directly investigated the impact of digital transformation on the firms' adjustment speed towards target level of tax burden up to now. Based on these, our study uses the data of A-share listed firms in China's capital market from 2007 to 2019 to construct research samples, and tries to investigate how digital transformation affects the adjustment speed towards the target level of tax burden. The results show that digital transformation can significantly improve the adjustment speed towards the target level of tax burden. Under a variety of robustness tests, the conclusion remains unchanged. The mechanism tests show that digital transformation can improve the adjustment speed to the target level of tax burden by enhancing the efficiency of information management and reducing the cost of coordination. Further research shows that there is no significant difference in the impact of digital transformation on the upward adjustment (increasing the level of tax burden to the target value) and downward adjustment (reducing the level of tax burden to the target value) of firms. Besides, the impact of digital transformation on the speed of adjustment to the target level of tax burden is more pronounced for firms that do not have overseas operations, firms with loose separation of decision-making rights, firms with a higher degree of product market compitition and firms in regions with lower tax enforcement intensity. Possible theoretical contributions of our study are as follows: (1) Enriching related research on the factors affecting the adjustment speed towards target level of tax burden: The research on the determination mechanism behind the adjustment speed has just started and the related research is still very scarce. Based on the perspective of digital transformation, our study makes up for the shortcomings of existing literature to some extent. (2) Providing empirical evidence of the impact of digital transformation on firms from the perspective of tax management activities: Our study not only researches the influence of digital transformation on the level of tax burden adjustment behavior from a dynamic perspective, but also reveals the impact mechanism of digital transformation on the adjustment speed, which is helpful to understand the internal logic and universal law of digital transformation affecting firms' behavior comprehensively and deeply. (3) Introducing the two-stage method of capital structure adjustment into the field of tax burden adjustment which has reference value for subsequent research: We adopt a two-stage method used in the field of capital structure adjustment, by firstly estimating the target level of tax burden, and then estimating the adjustment speed, when studying how digital transformation affects the adjustment speed. Compared with existing methods in the field of tax burden adjustment, this method is easier to expand. By adding the interaction term of the specified variable and the variable of the deviation degree of the firm's level of tax burden, we can test the influence of the variable on the adjustment speed towards the target level of tax burden, which has reference value for subsequent research. In practice, this paper may have the following contributions: (1) research comprehensively reveals the influence of digital transformation on the firms' fiscal and taxation management and provides a theoretical basis for the firm to vigorously promote digital reform. Since digital transformation requires firms to invest large resources, and there are some uncertainties, the attitude of different industries and different types of firms to digital transformation is not consistent. This study finds that digital transformation can improve the tax management level of firms and provides theoretical support for firms to promote digital construction. (2) The managers should make full use of the advantages brought by digital transformation to realize the rapid adjustment to the target level of tax burden. We find that digital transformation can improve the adjustment speed by meeting the information needs of top managers and reducing the cost of coordination. This means that if a firm wants to effectively improve the level of tax management through digital transformation, it not only needs to organically apply digital technologies to the whole process of collection, processing and transmission of tax-related information, but also needs to use these technologies to better coordinate the interests and resources of all parties. In short, firms should exploit the advantages brought by digital transformation, strive to improve the level of tax management, and achieve high-quality development.
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