The Impact of Uncertainty on Tax Burden of Companies Listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange: The Quantile Regression Approach

Today, the tax system, as an essential factor directly related to the survival and development of the budget and economy, has become the core of theoretical and empirical research in financial and monetary classification. But taxes are influenced by many factors that differ in different countries. One of the essential cases is uncertainty in economic policies, which has wide-ranging effects on the performance of macroeconomics and various companies. Uncertainty in economic policy, the future, and corporate planning provide significant difficulties and result in a decline in the amount of economic activity, a decrease in corporate revenue, and an increase in the desire among corporations to broaden defensive tax policies. Therefore, it is necessary to include the effects of uncertainty in the experimental models that investigate the factors affecting the tax burden (as a defensive behavior). This research aims to investigate the impact of the amount of tax collection on the relationship between the uncertainty of economic policies and tax defensive behavior in companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2018 with the quantile regression approach. The findings of this Paper showed that the effect of inflation uncertainty and Tobin's q-ratio index on taxpayers' defensive behavior was positive and asymmetric. Also, based on other results, the impact of other influential factors on the defensive behavior of taxpayers has been symmetrical. On the other hand, the effect of the tax collection variable on tax defensive behavior has been positive and significant, and the inclusion of this variable in the model has reduced the relationship between the uncertainty of economic activities and the defensive behavior of companies.