This paper reviews the economic effects of the EU Savings Taxation Directive. The Directive aims at enabling taxation of foreign interest payments received by individuals in accordance with the rules of their State of residence. The data suggest that the Directive, which is based on automatic...

Multinational companies can exploit the tax advantage of debt more aggressively than national companies by shifting debt from affiliates in low tax countries to affiliates in high tax countries. Previous papers have either omitted internal debt or external debt from the analysis. We are the...

This paper is concerned with tax-planning strategies of multinational corporations. A theoretical analysis discusses the choice of the capital structure in a setting where intercompany loans can be used to shift profits to low-tax countries. Empirical evidence is provided using micro-level panel...

Using a large international firm-level data set, we estimate separate effects of host and parent country taxation on the location decisions of multinational firms. Both types of taxation are estimated to have a negative impact on the location of new foreign subsidiaries. In fact, the impact of...

This paper provides empirical evidence on two potential costs of shared ownership of German affiliates abroad. First, in periods of currency crises, wholly-owned affiliates, in contrast to partially-owned affiliates, seem to circumvent financial constraints by accessing capital from their parent...

Bank intermediated finance has been cited frequently as the preferred means for channeling funds from savers to firms. Germany is the prototypical economy where universal banks allegedly exert substantial influence over firms. Despite frequent assertions about the considerable power of German...

The paper argues that the weakest link principle, which has been widely used as a measure of ultimate owners’ control rights, has a number of serious problems. A theoretically more satisfactory method of measuring control rights, based on voting power indices, is proposed, and the different...

We show how temporary ownership by private equity firms affects industry structure, competition and welfare. Temporary ownership leads to strong investment incentives because equilibrium resale prices are determined by buyers incentives to block rivals from obtaining assets. These incentives...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

We analyze the long-term effects of firm break-up and ownership change on corporate performance. Our analysis is based on a unique data set for a large number of Czech firms spanning the period 1996–2005. We employ a propensity score matching procedure to deal with endogeneity problems. Our...