We investigate whether there is a link between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion. We use a public goods game to classify subjects by type of contribution preference and by belief about the contributions of others; and we measure betrayal aversion for different categories of subject....

The paper analyzes the efficiency costs of dividend taxation in an effort-based corporate agency model in which non-verifiable managerial effort enhances taxable profits. We show that investment changes following a rise in dividend taxes might not be sufficient to infer the efficiency cost of...

Using an agency model of firm behavior, the paper analyzes whether the cost of investment should be tax exempt. The findings suggest that, when managers engage in wasteful capital expenditures, welfare may decline if the cost of investment is tax deductible, as commonly advocated. The extent to...

The effects of corporate taxation on firm behavior have been extensively discussed in the neoclassical model of firm behavior which abstracts from agency problems. As emphasized by the corporate governance literature, corporate investment behavior is however crucially influenced by diverging...

We develop a positive model of multinational firm behavior and analyze a firm's incentive to transfer an intellectual property (IP) right of uncertain value offshore ex ante, i.e. before its success or failure is realized. With an asymmetric treatment of losses in the home country, the...

Recent empirical research documents a tendency of affiliates of multinational enterprises to bunch around zero reported profit. Setting up a model that allows for profitable and loss-making affiliates of multinationals, we show that profit shifting to a low-tax country as well as a loss-related,...

There is ample evidence that internal capital markets incur efficiency costs for multinational enterprises (MNEs). This paper analyzes whether tax avoidance behavior interacts with the costs of running an internal capital market and how policies of competing governments respond to it. We show...

We develop a positive model of multinational firm behavior and analyze a firm’s incentive to transfer an intellectual property (IP) right of uncertain value offshore ex ante, i.e. before its success or failure is realized. With an asymmetric treatment of losses in the home country, the...

Peer observation can influence social norm perceptions as well as behavior in various moral domains, but is the tendency to be influenced by and conform with peers domain-general? In an online experiment (N = 815), we studied peer effects in honesty and cooperation and tested the...

The prisoner’s dilemma (PD) is arguably the most important model of social dilemmas, but our knowledge about how a PD’s material payoff structure affects cooperation is incomplete. In this paper we investigate the effect of variation in material payoffs on cooperation, focussing on one-shot...