190404 - Do Socially Responsible Corporations Pay Taxes?

Seminar "Do Socially Responsible Corporations Pay Taxes?"

Thursday 4 April 2019, 12.30 - 2.30 pm, Sciences Po, Salle du Conseil, 13 rue de l’université, 75007 Paris

The social responsibilities of for-profit corporations have gained importance recently, and CSR (corporate social responsibility) has become both a goal and a set of guidelines for various corporate activities. CSR encompasses a number of dimensions, including environmental impacts, treatment of employees, and relations to local communities. Here we consider the relationship between CSR and corporate taxes: do firms that are “good citizens” also pay higher taxes? Is it the social responsibility of firms to help pay for public services? Focusing on the percentile rank of effective tax rates, and using random effects panel regression of a data set of publicly-traded U.S. firms that includes measures of CSR and many financial variables, we find that the relationship between CSR and taxation is a complicated one that warrants further investigation. Strong corporate governance, a typical component of CSR, is associated with lower tax rates, suggesting that responsibility to shareholders conflicts with broader social responsibilities.

Speaker: Bruce G. Carruthers, Visiting Fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, John D. MacArthur Professor, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University

The areas of interest of his research include comparative and historical sociology, economy and society, sociology of law and sociology of organizations. His current research projects include a study of the historical evolution of credit as a problem in the sociology of trust, regulatory arbitrage, what modern derivatives markets reveal about the relationship between law and capitalism, and the regulation of credit for poor people in early 20th Century America. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/ quantitative distinction is worth fighting over.

Discussion:

Marie-Laure Salles Djelic, Dean of the Sciences Po School of Management and Innovation and researcher at theCenter for the Sociology of Organizations

Matthias Thiemann, Sciences Po, CEE

Compulsory registration - For the external people to Sciences Po: You will have to arrive 10 minutes before the beginning of the seminar and to provide you with your identity papers)

Contact: matthias.thiemann@sciencespo.fr

*Key Theme: The transformations of Capitalism