Corporate governance, ownership structure, firm characteristics and their effects on effective tax rate: A study on Philippine publicly listed companies

This study aimed to examine the relationship between ETR and its determinants and analyze the effect of such determinants to ETR of Philippine listed companies. The panel regression model analysis was used on 52 publicly listed companies with 520 firm years. The test findings showed that board size has significant negative effect on ETR of publicly listed companies, indicating that expertise being provided by incremental members of the board are inclined into tax management activities and their ownership interest to related companies induce them to lower tax burden. However, the effect of other corporate governance variables on the corporate ETR was found to be insignificant. In general, ownership structure variables did not have significant effect on the corporate tax burden of listed companies. The result suggested that the level of capital investment brings significant variation on the corporate tax burden. Firms with higher profit yield and wider growth prospective have lower tax burden and controlling for their effects are important in analyzing the variability on ETR. Consistent with prior evidences, inventory intensity is found to have significant positive effect on ETR. Unlike investment incentives variables, sector variable has significant effect on the tax burden of sample listed companies. Keywords: Effective tax rate, publicly listed companies, corporate governance, ownership structure, firm characteristics