Regional administrative monopoly and corporate tax avoidance: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China

This paper investigates the effect of implementing anti-monopoly laws on corporate tax avoidance. Based on the data of China's A-share non-financial listed companies from 2004 to 2015, this research adopts the staggered Difference-in-differences (DID) method to find that implementing the anti-monopoly law provides more incentives for managers to engage in more aggressive tax strategies. Furthermore, this paper finds that the effect of the anti-monopoly law on corporate tax avoidance depends on the scale of firms, state ownership, corporate governance mechanism, and regional economic development. This study provides a new perspective for researching the economic consequences of the anti-monopoly law and offers new empirical evidence for researching the determinants of corporate tax avoidance, providing a theoretical basis and empirical evidence for China to accelerate the construction of a national unified market and the optimization process of the economic system.