The initial cost of capital of a foreign subsidiary, financed by its parent from abroad, is dependent on repatriation taxes and this also applies to all follow-up investments financed from marginal foreign profits, representing the required return on the initial investment. Only investments...

We analyze free-riding behavior by Finnish municipalities prior to municipal mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, which arises because of a delay from the initial merger decision to the actual merger. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find large...

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighbouring...

In 2000, revenues from corporate income tax (CIT) in Finland were seven times higher than in 1994. We decompose the aggregate development of CIT revenues in a number of ways in order to establish what aspects of corporate taxation changed. We present the average effective tax rate for...

The study analyses the capital income taxation of foreign-source income, where residence and source criteria are the two well-known tax criteria. The study presents a globally optimal tax rule which equalizes the shadow price of capital in the countries and which is assumed to be a weighted...

It is challenging to distinguish the role of information in tax compliance from other factors affecting it. This paper utilizes a novel natural field experiment design to study the issue. In the experiment firms reporting their VAT were sent a letter asking them questions about their attitude...

This study examines the extent of direct tax avoidance through income-shifting between wages and dividends, and approximates the deadweight loss due to this behavior for the owners of privately held corporations. The dual income tax system in Finland offers noticeable incentives for...

Previous literature shows that income taxation significantly affects the behavior of high-income earners and business owners. However, it is still unclear how much of the response is due to changes in effort and other real economic activity, and how much is caused by tax avoidance and tax...

We explore how a firm-level tax on redistributed foreign profits affects the choices of a multinational enterprise (MNE) using evidence from a recent tax reform in Finland. The so-called equalization tax (EQT) used to be a regular element of European imputation systems, designed to ensure that...

Based on existing evidence, we know little about how the taxation of small business owners affects their economic activity. This paper studies the effect of two Finnish tax reforms, in 1997 and 1998, on the effort decisions of the owners of small businesses, utilizing both theoretical model and...