Redefining Purpose: The Effect of the 2019 Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Tax Strategies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Business Roundtable (BRT) firms have faced intense scrutiny from investors, media, and the public following their 2019 “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” which marked a shift from shareholder‐centric governance to a stakeholder‐focused approach. This shift has sparked debate over whether BRT firms are genuinely committed to social responsibility or merely using it as a branding strategy without implementing meaningful changes. This paper contributes to the debate by empirically examining a key dimension of social responsibility—corporate tax behavior. Using a difference‐in‐difference analysis covering 2004–2022, we find that BRT firms engage in higher levels of tax avoidance than other publicly listed U.S. firms. More importantly, our results indicate that BRT firms have not significantly adjusted their tax behavior since the 2019 Statement, suggesting a disconnect between their stated commitment and actual practices. Our findings provide new insights into the social responsibility of BRT firms and contribute to the broader literature on the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and CSR.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".