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Taxes, Theft, and Firm Performance
Author(s) -
MIRONOV MAXIM
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
the journal of finance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 18.151
H-Index - 299
eISSN - 1540-6261
pISSN - 0022-1082
DOI - 10.1111/jofi.12026
Subject(s) - enforcement , revenue , business , database transaction , tax revenue , tax evasion , evasion (ethics) , monetary economics , industrial organization , accounting , economics , public economics , immune system , immunology , political science , computer science , law , biology , programming language
This paper examines the interaction between income diversion and firm performance. Using unique Russian banking transaction data, I identify 42,483 spacemen, fly‐by‐night firms created specifically for income diversion. Next, I build a direct measure of income diversion for 45,429 companies and show that it is negatively related to firm performance. I identify the main reason for the observed effect as managerial diversion rather than tax evasion per se. I further show that stricter tax enforcement can improve firm performance: a one standard deviation increase in tax enforcement corresponds to an increase in the annual revenue growth rate of 2.6%.