The Influence of Firm Size, Leverage, and Sales Growth on Property Sector Companies Listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during 2022–2024

Abstract

Corporate tax aggressiveness remains an important issue because firms may differ in how their financial and organizational characteristics relate to the effective tax burden they report. This study examined the relationships of firm size, leverage, and sales growth with tax aggressiveness among property and real estate companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during 2022–2024. Tax aggressiveness was proxied by the esffective tax rate (ETR), with higher ETR values indicating lower tax aggressiveness. The analysis was based on 57 firm-year observations from 19 companies and employed multiple linear regression following descriptive analysis and regression assumption testing. Because the initial model exhibited non-normal residuals, ETR and sales growth were transformed before the final model was estimated. The results showed that firm size was positively and significantly associated with ETR (B = .076, p = .018), indicating that larger firms tended to exhibit lower tax aggressiveness under the ETR-based operationalization. In contrast, leverage (B = .136, p = .878) and sales growth (B = −.083, p = .874) were not significantly associated with ETR. The overall regression model was statistically significant, F(3, 53) = 2.807, p = .048, but demonstrated limited explanatory capacity (adjusted R² = .088). These findings indicate that firm size was the only corporate characteristic examined that showed a significant partial relationship with the tax aggressiveness proxy. However, the results should be interpreted cautiously because heteroskedasticity and positive autocorrelation remained in the transformed model. The study highlights the importance of considering both the direction of ETR-based measurement and model diagnostics when interpreting empirical evidence on corporate tax aggressiveness.