This paper investigates the impact of CEOs' traumatic experiences on corporate tax avoidance. Using CEOs who experienced the Korean War, we find that firms led by war-traumatized CEOs exhibit lower levels of tax avoidance than those led by non-traumatized CEOs. Our results are robust to controlling for managerial characteristics, such as CEO age, education, and stock ownership, and to the applications of propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and placebo tests. Analysis of CEO turnover further bolsters our main finding. We also find that the effect of CEO war trauma on tax avoidance is less pronounced for firms that belong to chaebols, have higher foreign investor ownership, and have award-winning CEOs. Overall, our results highlight the role of traumatic experiences in shaping CEOs' risk preferences, which, in turn, affect corporate tax planning.

中文翻译：

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首席执行官的战争创伤和公司避税

本文调查了 CEO 的创伤经历对公司避税的影响。使用经历过朝鲜战争的 CEO，我们发现，由受战争创伤的 CEO 领导的公司比由未受创伤的 CEO 领导的公司表现出更低的避税水平。我们的结果对于控制管理特征（例如 CEO 年龄、教育程度和股票所有权）以及倾向得分匹配、熵平衡和安慰剂检验的应用是稳健的。对 CEO 更替的分析进一步支持了我们的主要发现。我们还发现，对于属于财阀、外国投资者所有权较高且拥有屡获殊荣的 CEO 的公司，CEO 战争创伤对避税的影响不太明显。总体而言，我们的结果强调了创伤经历在塑造 CEO 的风险偏好方面的作用，这反过来又会影响公司税务规划。