This Handbook entry presents a conceptual, normative overview of the subject of taxation. It emphasizes the relationships among the main functions of taxation—notably, raising revenue, redistributing income, and correcting externalities—and the mapping between these functions and various...

This paper constructs indicators of tax burden on FDI in order to review their trends and cross-country patterns. Over the 1990s, the overall tax burden on inward FDI (measured by the effective marginal tax rates) fell by 8 percentage points, reflecting corporate tax reforms in some OECD...

The integration of world capital markets carries important implications for the design and impact of tax policies. This paper evaluates research findings on international taxation, drawing attention to connections and inconsistencies between theoretical and empirical observations. Diamond and...

We assess the business provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the biggest corporate tax cut in US history. We draw five lessons. First, corporate tax revenue fell by 40 percent due to the lower rate and more generous expensing. Second, firms with larger declines in their effective tax...

The current international tax system diverges greatly from a theoretically ‘‘optimal’’ tax system. One reason for this discrepancy may be that politicians strive for other objectives rather than making tax rules that comply with the theoretical concepts of optimal taxation. In this...

This paper contributes to the literature providing indirect evidence for profit shifting within multinational companies. In contrast to the previous studies, we take account of the tax responsiveness of the capital stock and analyze the effect of corporate taxes on both pre- and posttax...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature that analyzes the European Union's policy to eliminate preferential corporate-tax regimes and the proposal to introduce a consolidated EU tax base with formula apportionment for the taxation of multinational firms. Since neither proposal...