Do State-Controlled Banks Pay More or Less Taxes? Evidence For Brazil

Research Question- Do Brazilian publicly-controlled banks pay less taxes than privately-controlled banks? Motivation- Common sense in society might assume that there is a principal-agent conflict whereby publicly-controlled banks would pay less taxes than privately-controlled banks. At the same time, some of the people who work in these public banks might assume that there are more aggressive tax strategies being used by private banks that are not used by public banks. Idea- To assess whether Brazilian state-owned banks are less likely to engage in aggressive tax planning compared to their privately-controlled peers. Data- Observations were extracted from the financial statements of banks listed on the Brazilian stock exchange for the period 2012 to 2021 (balanced panel data). Tools- We performed multivariate regressions to identify whether the presence of state control explains the variation in effective tax rates. Three different effective tax rate formulas were used as proxies for tax aggressiveness, two of them based on revenue, the first consisting only of current income taxes and the second consisting of current and deferred income taxes, and a third proxy analyzing taxation on gross revenue. The estimations also included several control variables related to the banking sector.