How Does the Newly-Added Tax-Related Environmental Information Affect the Actual Tax Burdens and Tax and Fee Costs of Enterprises? Empirical Research on Environmental Protection Tax Reform
Currently, China's tax system reform is increasingly emphasizing the completeness and accuracy of tax-related information, and China has implemented multiple reform measures. On January 1, 2018, the Environmental Protection Tax Law of the People's Republic of China was officially implemented. The environmental protection tax reform allowed the tax departments to add tax-related environmental information of enterprises and also enabled the government to better achieve the goal of environmental governance. So, how will this policy affect the actual tax burdens and tax and fee costs of listed companies as the tax authorities acquire more tax-related information of taxpayers?This paper takes the newly-added tax-related environmental information in the 2018 environmental protection tax reform as a quasi-natural experiment and uses listed companies in the CSMAR Database from 2014 to 2020 as samples. Heavy-polluting listed companies that are significantly affected by the environmental protection tax reform are set as the experimental group and other companies as the control group. The difference-in-differences method is used to study the impact of newly-added tax-related environmental information on the actual tax burdens and tax and fee costs of enterprises. The empirical results show that the environmental protection tax reform enables the tax departments to acquire more tax-related environmental information of enterprises, which will reduce the actual tax burdens and tax and fee costs of enterprises and exert a more significant impact on tax and fee costs. Further analysis reveals that the addition of tax-related environmental information can reduce enterprises' actual tax burdens and tax and fee costs by improving the R&D level, reducing actual tax payments, and expanding their business scales, and it exerts a significant negative impact on the tax and fee costs of non-state-owned enterprises, significantly increases the income tax and turnover tax costs, and reduces the costs of environmental protection tax of enterprises. Although extensive literature has studied the impact of environmental protection tax reform on corporate behaviors, there is still a significant controversy over the research results of the impact of newly-added tax-related information on corporate tax burdens. The main contributions of this paper are reflected in the following two aspects. It explores the impact of newly-added tax-related environmental information on the actual tax burdens and tax and fee costs of enterprises and conducts empirical testing through the microdata of listed companies. This broadens the research perspective and enriches the relevant research on the actual tax burdens and tax and fee costs of enterprises. In addition, this paper verifies that R&D investment is an important mechanism variable that affects the actual tax burdens and tax and fee costs of enterprises. This mechanism variable works by reducing actual tax payments and expanding business scales. The empirical results of this paper enrich the research on tax-related information. At the same time, against the background of tax and fee reduction, the findings also provide empirical evidence for the continuous promotion of environmental protection tax reform.
actual tax burdens of enterprisestax and fee costs of enterprisesenvironmental protection tax reformtax-related environmental informationnewly-added information
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