We develop a theory of a firm in an incomplete contracts environment which decides on its complexity, organization, and global scale. Specifically, the firm decides i) how thinly it wants to slice its production process by choosing the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are...

This paper investigates the tax responsiveness of multinational firms’ investment decisions in foreign countries, distinguishing firms that are able to avoid taxes (avoiders) from those that are not (non-avoiders). From a theoretical point of view, the tax responsiveness of firms crucially...

This paper investigates the consequences of a series of alternative international tax designs on the strategy of a multinational enterprise regarding the cross border distribution of its investment and the choice of its financing behavior. We start with a world where no international tax rules...

This paper presents a new approach to estimating the existence and magnitude of tax-motivated income shifting within multinational corporations. Existing studies of income shifting use changes in corporate tax rates as a source of identification. In contrast, this paper exploits exogenous...

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...

We sketch a model according to which tax havens attract corporate income generated in corrupted countries. In our framework, tax havens have two opposite effects on welfare. First, tax havens’ services have a positive effect on welfare through encouraging investment by firms fearing...

We develop a general equilibrium two-country model with heterogeneous producers and rent sharing at the firm level due to fairness preferences of workers. We identify two sources of a multinational wage premium. On the one hand, there is a pure composition effect because multinational firms are...

Recent studies indicate that firms often outsource standard and simple tasks, while keeping complex and important inputs inside their boundaries. This observation is difficult to reconcile with the property rights approach of the firm, which suggests that important components should be...

I show in this paper that incomplete contracts affect a firm’s decision about serving foreign customers through exports or local sales from an affiliated plant. When contracts between two agents within a firm are too costly to write, the share of multinational firms may be higher or lower...

We analyze a model that focuses on the export/outsource decision. Outsourcing has the advantage of providing better information about local preferences. The disadvantage is that producing in the host country also means using the inferior technology embodied in the local capital. The decision of...