关键词: 企业避税, 会计信息质量, 年报可读性, 文本分析

Abstract: Tax avoidance activities increase the information asymmetryWill managers disclose information with obscure text in order to hide such tax avoidance behavior? Using a data set of Chinese Ashare listed firms from 2008 to 2017，this paper examines the relation between corporate tax avoidance and annual report readabilityThe results show that the more tax avoidance activities，the more complex vocabularies will be used in annual report，and the worse the annual report readabilityAfter using instrumental variable to address possible endogenous problems，and several robust checks with different annual report readability and corporate tax avoidance measures，the above results still holdThis paper further considers the effect of deferred income tax and the impact of tax policies，the conclusion that tax avoidance significantly reduces the readability of corporate annual reports still hold robustThis paper also finds that tax avoidance reduces annual report readability by reducing the quality of accounting informationThe view that the text information disclosure should be coordinated with digital information is verified from the perspective of corporate tax avoidanceIn addition，the negative relation between tax avoidance and annual report readability is more pronounced for firms without tax incentives，with more deferred income tax liabilities and with poor external corporate governanceTherefore，improving corporate tax system can effectively help to reduce corporate tax avoidance and restrict managerial rent seeking，thereby improving the information disclosure quality of firms

Key words: corporate tax avoidance, accounting information quality, annual report readability, textual analysis  ,