Tax neutrality towards alternative financing instruments for corporate investment is a ubiquitous demand in the political debate. At the same time, the literature is surprisingly silent about the magnitude of possible efficiency costs of a departure from tax neutrality. Against this background,...

The paper evaluates the working of German CFC rules that restrict the use of foreign subsidiaries located in low-tax countries to shelter passive investment income from home taxation. While passive investments make up a significant fraction of German outbound FDI, we find that German CFC rules...

By granting intracompany loans to their foreign affiliates, multinational firms may reduce their tax liability abroad. Many countries have legislated thin-capitalization rules (TCRs) that limit the allowable levels of intracompany loans or restrict interest deductibility if certain thresholds...

In this study, we estimate the impacts of differences in international tax rates on the probability of choosing a location for an affiliate of a multinational firm. In particular, we distinguish between the tax sensitivity of Greenfield and M&A investments. Based on a novel firm-level dataset on...

A long-standing concern in the literature has been that household mobility implies a serious threat to the viability of redistributive taxation. This paper considers the effects of deferred integration of migrants into the redistributive system of the target country. In a model of symmetric...

We introduce tax competition for mobile labor into an optimal-taxation model with two skill levels. We analyze a symmetric subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium of the game between two governments and two taxpayer populations. Tax competition reduces the distortion from the informational asymmetry...

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...