This paper examines the effect of languages on corporate tax avoidance. We hypothesize and find that managers of firms in countries with languages that grammatically distinguish the future from the present (languages with a strong future time reference or FTR) perceive the potential future tax repayments and penalties to be more distant and therefore engage in more tax avoidance. Further tests exploiting the variation in language FTR within Switzerland and Belgium, which have different official languages in different regions but a single tax system, suggest that our findings are not driven by country-level differences in the tax system. We also provide evidence that U.S. firms with CEOs born in countries with strong FTR languages avoid more taxes than those with CEOs born in weak FTR countries, indicating that it is the CEO’s native tongue that affects tax avoidance. Collectively, our findings highlight the importance of social norms in understanding corporate tax strategies.

本文研究了语言对公司避税的影响。我们进行了假设并发现，在使用语法上将未来与现在进行语法区分的国家（具有强大的未来时间参考或FTR的语言）的国家/地区的公司的经理认为，潜在的未来税收返还和罚款距离较远，因此需要更多的避税行为。进一步的测试开发中瑞士和比利时的语言FTR的变化，其中有不同在不同的区域，但一个官方语言单税收制度，这表明我们的发现并非受国家/地区税收制度差异的影响。我们还提供证据表明，拥有在FTR语言丰富的国家/地区出生的CEO的美国公司比在FTR国家语言较弱的国家/地区拥有CEO的公司避免缴税更多，这表明，首席执行官的母语会影响避税。总的来说，我们的发现突出了社会规范在理解公司税收策略中的重要性。