SungMan Yoon

The government has implemented various tax incentive policies to support the generation and growth of corporate profits, leading to what is known as an implicit tax. In actuality, there is no implicit tax phenomenon because this phenomenon occurs in a perfectly competitive market where there are no barriers to entry, transaction costs, or transaction friction. Since most Chinese companies are owned by the Chinese government and are not fully capitalist markets, the possibility of more implicit taxes is not expected to occur. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether the Chinese government’s ownership of enterprises and the global financial crisis have had an effect on the realization of the implicit tax phenomena. The results of this study are as follows. First, the pre-tax return on equity (PTROE) of listed Chinese companies had a statistically significant positive relationship with the pre-tax subsidy on equity (PTSE). Second, for companies with a higher level of Chinese government-owned interest, PTROE had a statistically significant positive relationship with PTSE; so this result shows that Chinese companies receive tax benefits, but an implicit tax in the market is not realized. Third, during the global financial crisis, the PTROE of Chinese companies showed an insignificant negative relationship with PTSE. In addition, companies owned by the Chinese government showed an insignificant negative relationship between PTROE and PTSE during the global financial crisis. This study provides policy implications that government ownership equity and macroeconomic events influence the level of freedom in a market economy.

This study examines whether the management style of a fund differs depending on the type of fund being managed for tax purposes, given the rules of temporary tax relief for fund investments. The study considers a change in the ratio of tax-favored assets to the net asset value of a tax relief qualified fund around the effective date of tax relief laws in South Korea in 2007 and 2016. A regression model is used to test sample data from domestic and overseas equity funds available in the three months before and after the 2007 and 2016 Restriction of Special Taxation Act came into effect. It was found that the ratio of the value of tax-favored assets to the net asset value in the tax relief qualified fund increased significantly since the enactment of tax relief laws in both 2007 and 2016. These findings suggest that fund managers may try to change the asset allocation in a managed fund to increase the after-tax return of the fund investor, which means that fund managers do take into account the potential tax burden on fund investors and try to minimize it.

Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF- 2019S1A5A8035027).