How do socially responsible companies engage in tax avoidance practices? Evidence from France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is part of the larger debate on whether firms engage in CSR to promote social interests or strictly to achieve legitimacy and thus are implicitly involved in some form of greenwashing. This paper investigates the effect of CSR on corporate tax avoidance. It also examines the roles of corporate governance, leverage, and family ownership in the CSR–tax avoidance relationship. Based on a sample of French listed companies from 2005 to 2017, the results show that firms engaging in CSR adopt tax avoidance practices, supporting the risk management and agency theory perspectives. This suggests that firms adopt CSR to forge a positive reputation and hedge risky tax positions. The results also show that the disciplinary roles of debt and corporate governance mitigate this positive effect. Additional evidence shows that family-owned firms overinvesting in CSR are unlikely to engage in tax avoidance for socioeconomic wealth purposes. The results are robust to alternative measures of tax avoidance and endogeneity concerns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".