This paper analyses tax competition between a unionised and a non-unionised country for the location of an outside firm. We show that unionisation offers an extra incentive for the government to attract a foreign competitor to a concentrated domestic market, in order to affect the behaviour of...

An important puzzle in corporate taxation is that effective tax rates have fallen significantly while tax revenue has simultaneously risen in most countries. Moreover, the gross profitability of firms seems to be lower in high-tax countries, even though standard models of international...

This paper analyses the development of the ratio of corporate taxes to wage taxes using a simple political economy model with internationally mobile and immobile firms. Among other results, our model predicts that countries reduce their corporate tax rate, relative to the wage tax, either when...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

This paper argues that the large reduction in corporate tax rates and only gradual widening of tax bases in many countries over the last decades are consistent with tougher international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI). To make this point we develop a model in which governments...

This paper uses a proportional hazard model to study foreign direct investment by Japanese manufacturers in Europe between 1970 and 1994. We divide each firm’s investment total into a sequence of individual investment decisions and analyze how firm-specific characteristics affect each...

This paper examines the link between a firm’s ownership of productive assets and its choice of foreign-market entry strategy. We find that, controlling for industry- and country-specific characteristics, the most productive firms (i.e., those owning the most assets) will enter through...

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one...

We use Japanese microdata to examine how financial market frictions affect foreign direct investment (FDI). The Japanese land price bubble and banking trouble in the late 1980s and early 1990s serve as a quasi natural experiment to identify two possible transmission channels from financial...