避税天堂直接投资与企业信息披露质量——基于年报重述视角的实证研究

Direct Investment in Tax Havens and Corporate Information Disclosure Quality:An Empirical Research Based on the Perspective of Annual Report Restatement

年报重述在上市公司中普遍存在,但鲜有文献从海外投资视角揭示年报重述的影响因素。本文以中国A股上市公司2007—2018年的数据为研究样本,实证检验了避税天堂直接投资对年报重述的影响,并基于信息不对称和代理成本的视角揭示其作用机制和治理机制。研究发现,拥有避税天堂直接投资的上市公司更有可能发生年报重述,在控制其他因素后,避税天堂直接投资公司的年报重述概率要比非避税天堂直接投资公司高15%以上。其原因在于,避税天堂直接投资降低了公司信息透明度、增加了公司代理成本,进而增加了公司年报重述的概率。进一步研究发现,避税天堂直接投资对坏消息类和补充公告类年报重述的正向影响更加明显,也会显著增加年报重述所涉及的领域数量和会计期间数量,而良好的内部控制和外部分析师关注可以发挥公司治理效应,削弱避税天堂直接投资对年报重述的正向影响。本文的研究在理论上有助于深刻理解企业海外投资行为对信息披露质量的影响,在实践上为加强避税天堂投资行为的监管以及完善企业信息披露质量提供了有益启示。

Applying China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2018 as the research sample,this paper empirically examines the impact of tax haven investment on annual report restatement.It also revels the influencing channel from the perspective of information asymmetry and agency cost,and explores the governance mechanism.The results show that listed companies with tax haven investment are more likely to occur annual report restatement.After controlling for other factors,the annual report restatement probability of the tax haven direct investment company is more than 15%higher than that of the non-tax haven direct investment company.This positive relationship continues to hold after conducting a series of robustness tests.By analyzing the influencing channel,it is found that tax haven investment decreases the firm’s information transparency,increases the firm’s agency cost,and further increases the likelihood of annual report restatement.Further study shows that this positive correlation is stronger for the bad news restatement and supplementary restatement.Tax haven investment also increases the areas and fiscal years involved in the restatement.Good internal control and external analyst coverage can play corporate governance roles,alleviating the impact of tax haven investment on annual report restatement.This paper is theoretically helpful in deeply understanding the impact of firms’foreign investment behavior on the quality of information disclosure.It enriches the research on the influencing factors of financial report restatement of China’s listed companies,and provides a useful supplement to the research literature on the economic consequences of direct investment in tax havens.The existing literature mainly examines the economic consequences of direct investment in tax havens from the perspectives of macroeconomic impact,tax avoidance effect,firm value,and audit fees,while this paper expands the research perspective in this filed by exploring annual report restatement.In addition,this paper provides a theoretical explanation of the impact of tax haven investment on annual report restatement based on the perspective of information asymmetry and agency cost,and reveals the governance effect of internal control and analyst attention.Finally,in practice,the findings provide useful implications for improving the supervision and governance of the tax haven investment of listed companies and improving the information disclosure quality of listed companies.