Recent empirical research documents a tendency of affiliates of multinational enterprises to bunch around zero reported profit. Setting up a model that allows for profitable and loss-making affiliates of multinationals, we show that profit shifting to a low-tax country as well as a loss-related,...

By introducing controlled-foreign-company (CFC) rules, the parent country of a multinational firm reserves the right to tax the income of the firm's foreign affiliates if the tax rate in the affiliate's host country is below a specified threshold. We identify the conditions under which binding...

This paper analyzes the relevance of firm losses for tax revenues and welfare when switching from separate accounting to a system of tax base consolidation with formula apportionment. We find that a system change unambiguously decreases tax revenues in the short run, in which neither firms nor...

Following recent court rulings, cross-border loss compensation for multinational firms will likely be introduced, at least in Europe. This paper analyzes the effects of introducing a coordinated cross-border tax relief in a setting where multinational firms choose the size of a risky investment...

This paper examines the flexibility of multinational firms to use income-shifting strategies within a tax year to react to operating losses. First, we develop an analytical model that considers how affiliate losses can be adjusted by using the transfer prices of tangible and intangible assets,...

This study develops theory and discusses implications of inflexibility in tax-motivated income shifting. We show that inflexibility to adjust income-shifting strategies within a tax year in response to losses implies that income-shifting incentives are based on the expected rather than the...

This paper analyzes corporate tax-related policies and the difference between them in developed and developing countries. I show that the relationship between financial development and corporate income tax rates as well as the tax administrations' effectiveness follows a U-shaped pattern, a...

We challenge the dichotomy of network effects and highlight that they are not an exogenous characteristic of networks, but endogenous to the decisions of network users. When users choose which activities to perform in a network, multi-activity users transform indirect into direct network...

In the absence of financial frictions, the purpose of thin capitalization rules is to limit multinational firms’ possibilities of engaging in tax planning via debt shifting. This paper analyzes the effects of thin capitalization rules in the case where firms have limited access to external...

This paper analyzes tax competition between countries which differ in their country-specific risk. We show that the outcome of asymmetric tax competition crucially depends on the ability of multinational firms to shift profits. With high costs of profit shifting, higher-risk countries set lower...