This paper uses the Bad News Principle to study how the ability of multinationals to shift profits by transfer pricing affects both the timing of foreign direct investment decisions and government tax policy. A main finding of the paper is that if countries compete to attract foreign direct...

This short article studies the tax effects on a start-up investment decision under uncertainty. Since the representative firm can decide both when to invest and how much to borrow, the distortive effects are twofold. We thus show that the deadweight loss (namely, the ratio between the welfare...

In this article we introduce a stochastic model with a multinational company (MNC) that exploits tax avoidance practices. We focus on both transfer pricing (TP) and debt shifting (DS) activities and show how their optimal level is chosen by the shareholders. In addition, we perform an extensive...

In this article we use a stochastic model with one representative firm to study business tax policy under default risk. We will show that, for a given tax rate, the government has an incentive to reduce (increase) financial instability and default costs if its objective function is welfare (tax...