We study the optimal combination of corporate tax rate and tax base in a model of a small open economy with heterogeneous firms. We show that it is optimal for the small country’s government to effectively subsidize capital inputs by granting a tax allowance in excess of the true costs of...

The tax competition for mobile capital, in particular the reluctance of small countries to agree on measures of tax coordination, has ongoing political and economic fallouts within Europe. We analyse the effects of introducing a two tier structure of capital taxation, where the asymmetric member...

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...

The paper compares non-cooperative commodity taxation under the destination and origin principles under a variety of different assumptions about market structure. We consider a model of international duopoly with either quantity or price competition of firms and either segmented or integrated...

Heterogeneous firm productivity seems to provide an argument for governments to pursue ‘pick-the-winner’ strategies by subsidizing highly productive firms more, or taxing them less, than their less productive counterparts. We appraise this argument by studying the optimal choice of effective...

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...

The rise in foreign direct investment and the increasing activity of multinational firms expose national corporate tax bases to cross-country profit shifting, but also lead to rising profitability of the corporate sector. We incorporate these two effects of economic integration into a simple...