Corporate tax avoidance presents a complex trade-off between potential short-term financial gains and significant long-term reputational and legal risks.
Such high-stakes decisions are shaped not only by financial rationality but also by executives' ...
Corporate tax avoidance presents a complex trade-off between potential short-term financial gains and significant long-term reputational and legal risks.
Such high-stakes decisions are shaped not only by financial rationality but also by executives' cognitive characteristics and the firm's market environment. This study, therefore, investigates how executive overconfidence (a key cognitive bias) and product market power (a structural competitive advantage) individually and interactively influence the extent of corporate tax avoidance.
Analyzing listed Korean firms (2006-2024), this study finds no direct effect of executive overconfidence on tax avoidance. However, stronger market power is linked to higher tax avoidance. Notably, this positive relationship is significantly amplified when firms are led by overconfident executives. These results suggest that structural opportunities from market power, combined with an executive's psychological tendency to underestimate risk, jointly reinforce aggressive tax avoidance.
This study further confirms a positive relationship between product market power and tax avoidance by employing the Long-Run Effective Tax Rate (Long-Run ETR) as a stable proxy measure. Firms exhibiting both high product market power and high executive overconfidence are particularly prone to high-risk decision-making.
These results provide practical implications for corporate tax risk management and governance reforms tailored to firm characteristics.