Advertising, Audit Committee Chair Overlap, and Tax Avoidance: Agency Theory Versus Resource-Based Theory?

Advertising is one of the effective factors of increasing the credibility of the firm and strengthening the social status of the firm among customers and tax avoidance. Also, based on agency theory, it is argued that audit committee chair overlaps can play a supervisory role by advising management to reduce the level of involvement in tax avoidance activities, or based on resource-based theory, due to communication and network channels, audit committee chair Overlapping audit committee chairpersons can encourage managers to further tax avoidance; Therefore, the present research examines the relationship between advertising and the amount of tax avoidance according to the audit committee chairman overlap according to the opposite theories of agency and based on resources in 142 firms (1172 firms - year) admitted to the Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 2012 to 2021. For this purpose, The hypothesis test was also done using Eviews econometric software and panel data statistical techniques. The results of the statistical tests of the research show that advertising reduces the firms tax avoidance. In other words; Firms with higher advertising spending and intensity have lower tax avoidance. Also, the results showed that the audit committee chairman overlap weakens this relationship. The findings of this study indicate that advertising helps to form the firms image and reputation among customers. If the firm is perceived as a firm with tax avoidance behavior, the benefits of advertising will be reduced. Greater customer awareness resulting from higher advertising expenditures increases the likelihood that customers will understand the firms aggressive tax behavior. Therefore, companies that spend more on advertising have less tax avoidance. Also, according to the resource-based theory, the audit committee chairman overlapping should consider the benefits of tax avoidance more than its disadvantages, which is the reduction of the firms image and credit, and use advertising as a strategy to improve the firms image and hide the firms opportunistic behavior. and at the same time play advisory roles for tax avoidance.