International Conference on Vocational Business, Logistic, Accounting, Supply Chain, Tax (ICoBLAST)

This study examines whether Corporate Social Responsibility, proxied by ESG Disclosure, is related to corporate tax behavior in emerging markets. This issue is relevant because Indonesian issuers face increasing demands for ESG reporting as well as tightening tax regulations, so consistency between sustainability narratives and fiscal practices becomes important for academics, regulators, and investors. Research question: Is the increase in ESGD associated with a higher CETR, meaning lower tax aggressiveness, and does this relationship differ across various parts of the CETR distribution. Previous evidence is largely average-based and rarely examines distributional effects in Indonesia. This study's contribution is to provide quantile evidence of the link between ESGD and CETR, stemming from the wide dispersion of CETR and thick distribution tails, which can mask average effects. This is an explanatory quantitative study of 68 issuers. After data cleaning by excluding years with pre-tax profit < 0 and negative CETR, 522 firm-years were collected. All  variables were sourced from Bloomberg. Estimation was performed using quantile regression at 0.25; 0.50; 0.75. ESGD is positively and significantly associated with CETR at the 0.25 and 0.75 quantiles, but not significant at the 0.50 quantile. Substantively, higher ESG disclosure aligns with lower tax aggressiveness, and its effect is concentrated in the tails of the distribution. CSR through ESG disclosure is correlated with more prudent tax behavior but is not evenly distributed across the distribution. These findings confirm the importance of a distributional perspective and the selection of quantile regression. Potential implementation: For regulators and exchanges, the results support monitoring focused on the tails of the distribution and strengthening the assurance of ESG reporting. Companies can leverage strong ESG governance to mitigate reputational risks, while investors can incorporate ESGD as a signal of tax risk in due diligence, and teaching can use this case to illustrate distribution-based analysis.