Empirical evidence on the impact of recent Korean tax reforms

In 2011, Korea required all firms to report all value added tax (VAT) invoices electronically to tax authorities. This unique law provided a natural experiment to examine the effects of this disclosure on income taxes and firms’ related responses. The authors find that this additional required discl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Namryoung Lee, Charles Swenson
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: LLC "CPC "Business Perspectives" 2018-10-01
Series:Investment Management & Financial Innovations
Subjects:
Online Access:https://businessperspectives.org/images/pdf/applications/publishing/templates/article/assets/11003/imfi_2018_04_Lee.pdf
Description
Summary:In 2011, Korea required all firms to report all value added tax (VAT) invoices electronically to tax authorities. This unique law provided a natural experiment to examine the effects of this disclosure on income taxes and firms’ related responses. The authors find that this additional required disclosure caused firms to become less aggressive on their income taxes, and that they were unable to pass increased tax burdens forward to consumers or backward to suppliers and labor. To maintain, profitability firms cut research and development (R&D) costs, and this cost cutting was larger for tax aggressive firms. Policy implications of this unintended result are discussed.
ISSN:1810-4967
1812-9358