Bilateral effective tax rates and foreign direct investment

This paper computes (marginal and average) forward-looking effective tax rates for a sample of more than 650,000 firms in and outside of Europe using Bureau van Dijk’s ORBIS data-base. Comparing the firm-level effective tax rates with their country-level counterparts we arrive at two important findings for empirical research on the behavioral response to taxation. First, the firm-level component of the effective tax burden is generally much more important than the one at the country level. Second, tentative empirical results on the nexus between firm level investment and corporate taxation illustrate that the conclusions obtained with forward looking firm-level effective tax rates differ starkly from those based on country-level forward-looking rates.