Executives’ Personal Tax Behavior and Corporate Tax Avoidance Consistency

We analyze executives’ (CEOs, CFOs, and Board Chairpersons) personal tax returns to investigate whether and how their personal tax behavior is associated with the tax avoidance of their firms. We develop various measures of executives’ personal tax behavior that are related to their personal risk propensity, ethics, financial incentives, and awareness of tax planning opportunities and risks. Our empirical results show that CEOs’ and CFOs’ personal tax behavior is related both to nonconforming and conforming corporate tax avoidance. We find no such results for Board Chairpersons.