Sastroredjo Probowo Erawan, Ausloos Marcel, Khrennikova Polina
School of Business, University of Leicester, Leicester LE2 1RQ, UK.
Department of Management, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung 40164, Indonesia.
Entropy (Basel). 2025 Jan 18;27(1):89. doi: 10.3390/e27010089.
Through its initiative known as the Climate Change Act (2008), the Government of the United Kingdom encourages corporations to enhance their environmental performance with the significant aim of reducing targeted greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050. Previous research has predominantly assessed this encouragement favourably, suggesting that improved environmental performance bolsters governmental efforts to protect the environment and fosters commendable corporate governance practices among companies. Studies indicate that organisations exhibiting strong corporate social responsibility (CSR), environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, or high levels of environmental performance often engage in lower occurrences of tax avoidance. However, our findings suggest that an increase in environmental performance may paradoxically lead to a rise in tax avoidance activities. Using a sample of 567 firms listed on the FTSE All Share from 2014 to 2022, our study finds that firms associated with higher environmental performance are more likely to avoid taxation. The study further documents that the effect is more pronounced for firms facing financial constraints. Entropy balancing, propensity score matching analysis, the instrumental variable method, and the Heckman test are employed in our study to address potential endogeneity concerns. Collectively, the findings of our study suggest that better environmental performance helps explain the variation in firms' tax avoidance practices.
通过其名为《气候变化法案》（2008年）的倡议，英国政府鼓励企业提高其环境绩效，其重要目标是到2050年减少目标温室气体排放。先前的研究大多对这种鼓励给予积极评价，表明改善环境绩效有助于政府的环境保护努力，并在公司中促进值得称赞的公司治理实践。研究表明，表现出强烈企业社会责任（CSR）、环境、社会和治理（ESG）标准或高水平环境绩效的组织往往较少发生避税行为。然而，我们的研究结果表明，环境绩效的提高可能会自相矛盾地导致避税活动的增加。我们的研究以2014年至2022年在富时全股指数上市的567家公司为样本，发现环境绩效较高的公司更有可能避税。该研究进一步证明，对于面临财务约束的公司，这种影响更为明显。我们的研究采用熵平衡、倾向得分匹配分析、工具变量法和赫克曼检验来解决潜在的内生性问题。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，更好的环境绩效有助于解释公司避税行为的差异。
