Corporate tax avoidance and corporate financialization: The moderating effect of managerial myopia

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether managers with tax avoidance motivation also engage in corporate financialization. Using a large sample of Chinese A‐share non‐financial listed firms from 2009 to 2020, the empirical results show that there is a positive association between corporate tax avoidance and corporate financialization. Moreover, the positive effect of tax avoidance on corporate financialization mainly manifests in firms with myopic managers. Our results are robust to alternative measures of both tax avoidance and managerial myopia. Two‐stage least squares (2SLS) regression and propensity score matching (PSM) confirm our results and mitigate any potential endogeneity issues. Overall, we show that the agency costs between shareholders and managers indeed play a critical role between tax avoidance and corporate financialization.