Multinational firms mitigate tax competition

An increase in the taxation of foreign affiliates reduces domestic investment, as has recently been empirically shown in Becker and Riedel (2012). This paper investigates the implication of this finding for tax competition. It is shown that an increase in the number of multinational firms (in contrast to purely national firms) may actually mitigate tax competition — counter to the popular opinion that multinational firms undermine the national capacity to levy source-based taxes.