Desai and Dharmapala (2006) present evidence that their measures of governance and
executive incentives have an interactive effect on the average level of firms’ tax aggressiveness.
Specifically, they provide evidence (in their Table 4) that there is no statistical relation between
their measure of tax aggressiveness and the ratio of annual stock option grant value to total
compensation for the firm’s top five executives in “well governed” firms (i.e., those that have a
low governance index score).16 However, they report a significant negative association between
their measure of tax aggressiveness and the ratio of stock option grant value to total
compensation for the firm’s top five executives in “poorly governed” firms (i.e., those that have
a high governance index score). We can generally replicate this result (i.e., Table 4 Column (4)
of Desai and Dharmapala, 2006) in our sample.17
Desai and Dharmapala (2006) discuss why it is not clear whether equity compensation
provides incentives for managers to engage in more or less aggressive tax strategies. They also
discuss how it is reasonable to expect that the degree to which equity-based compensation
provides incentives for tax aggressiveness is a function of the firm’s other governance
mechanisms since they can serve as complements and substitutes for each other. However, they
do not attempt to either model this complexity in their research design or consider that effects
may vary across the tax avoidance distribution. Therefore, we re-estimate Desai and