We analyze the effect of mandatory financial transparency on corporate tax avoidance. The effectiveness of comprehensive tax transparency, in the form of a public country-by-country reporting, to mitigate corporate tax planning is largely unknown. Capital Requirements Directive IV by the European Commission required multinational banks to publish key financial and tax data in the form of public country-by-country reporting. We examine tax avoidance of banks around the reform. Our focus is on multinational banks newly required to report activities in tax havens that had not been publicly disclosed before the country-by-country reporting mandate. We predict and find that these exposed banks increased their tax expense relative to multinational banks with no activities in tax havens to disclose, as well as relative to domestic banks unaffected by the new mandate. In additional tests, we compare our sample of exposed multinational banks to several control groups from the financial sector and other industries. Our results suggest that country-by-country reporting can serve as an additional policy instrument to curb corporate tax avoidance, but only when the reporting exposes the firms' tax sheltering activities to public scrutiny.

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拯救财务透明度：欧盟银行业国别公开报告对避税的影响*

我们分析了强制性财务透明度对企业避税的影响。以公开的国别报告的形式，全面的税收透明度在减轻公司税收筹划方面的有效性在很大程度上是未知的。欧盟委员会的资本要求指令 IV 要求跨国银行以公开的国别报告形式发布关键的财务和税务数据。我们围绕改革研究银行的避税行为。我们的重点是新要求跨国银行报告在逐国报告授权之前尚未公开披露的避税天堂活动。我们预测并发现，与在避税天堂没有活动可披露的跨国银行相比，这些暴露的银行增加了税收支出，以及相对于不受新授权影响的国内银行。在额外的测试中，我们将暴露的跨国银行样本与来自金融部门和其他行业的几个控制组进行了比较。我们的结果表明，国别报告可以作为遏制公司避税的额外政策工具，但前提是报告将公司的避税活动暴露在公众监督之下。