Paying taxes to support the societies in which they operate is both a legal and ethical responsibility of business. Nevertheless, some companies work to avoid taxes, which could cause society to question the legitimacy of the organisation. Many companies provide reports on their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities; more transparent CSR reports may help to restore the legitimacy loss associated with tax avoidance. We investigate the relationship between tax avoidance and CSR report readability among Chinese companies. We find a positive relationship between corporate tax avoidance and the readability of CSR reports. This relation is weaker among state‐owned enterprises, which may have stronger pre‐existing legitimacy owing to their relationship with the state. The relationship is also weaker among companies in less developed regions of China, which have less developed institutions to monitor organisational legitimacy. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that CSR reporting represents an attempt to overcome legitimacy concerns arising from tax avoidance. Our findings indicate that tax avoidance and CSR reporting are alternative means of establishing legitimacy, rather than complementary reflections of an organisational culture that values (or devalues) CSR.

We propose a positive association between voluntary MEFs and the value relevance of earnings in audited financial reports based on the confirmation, signaling, and expectation management effects of voluntary MEFs. China is characterized by a weaker information environment, which provides a meaningful institutional setting for testing the usefulness of MEFs. We find that firms that provide voluntary MEFs have significantly higher value relevance of earnings and earnings components (i.e., operating cash flows and normal/abnormal accruals) in financial reports. We also find that the specificity of MEFs is associated with higher value relevance of earnings. In a placebo test, we do not find a similar relation between MEFs and the value relevance of balance-sheet items in most regressions, indicating that our findings are unlikely to be driven by other differences in fundamentals. Our findings are robust to different research designs and confirm the usefulness of voluntary MEFs in emerging markets.

This paper examines the effects of human resource quality (HRQ) on multidimensional firm performance of Chinese listed firms. Consistent with the positive role of education, we find that higher HRQ contributes to Chinese listed firms with higher return on equity (ROE) and higher market to book ratio (MTB). We address endogeneity concerns with change model regressions, instrumental variable methodology and difference-in-difference analysis. The findings are robust to alternative research designs and different subsets of sample firms. Additional analyses show that the HRQ effects on overall performance are channeled by intermediate performance on productivity, innovation, debt financing and analysts following.

This study examines the impact of judicial delocalization on corporate tax avoidance by exploiting the staggered establishment of cross-provincial Circuit Tribunals in China as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that judicial delocalization significantly reduces corporate tax avoidance, with the effect concentrated among firms lacking political connections. The channel analyses indicates that the reform imposes a binding enforcement discipline on financially constrained firms by strengthening judicial credibility and substitute weak local governance arrangements. Additionally, we also find that the deterrent effect of the reform is more pronounced for firms that were more embedded in local protectionist environments prior to the reform, including older firms and firms with longer operating cycles. Our study highlights the importance of the spatial organization of judicial authority in shaping enforcement credibility and provides new evidence that judicial delocalization can serve as an effective institutional mechanism for curbing corporate tax avoidance in emerging economies.