We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

We develop a theory of a firm in an incomplete contracts environment which decides on its complexity, organization, and global scale. Specifically, the firm decides i) how thinly it wants to slice its production process by choosing the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are...

Recent studies indicate that firms often outsource standard and simple tasks, while keeping complex and important inputs inside their boundaries. This observation is difficult to reconcile with the property rights approach of the firm, which suggests that important components should be...

Advance pricing agreements (APAs) determine transfer prices for intra-firm transactions in advance. This paper interprets these contracts as a means to overcome a hold-up problem that occurs because governments cannot commit to non-excessive future tax rates. In addition, with private...

We demonstrate that the choice of the transfer price and its effect on intra-firm trade and investment depends on the probability of detection and thus on the measure, on which tax authorities base their audit. A policy implication of the paper is that it should be preferable to condition audits...

This paper analyzes the transfer pricing of multinational firms. We propose a simple framework in which intra-firm prices may systematically deviate from arm's length prices for two motives: i) pricing to market, and ii) tax avoidance. Multinational firms may decide not to avoid taxes if the...

We study the choice between source-based and destination-based corporate taxes in a two-country model, allowing multinational firms to use transfer pricing to allocate profits across tax jurisdictions. We show that source-based taxation is a Nash equilibrium for tax revenue maximizing...

We study the link between a country’s institutional quality in tax collection and its optimal corporate tax policies in a model of heterogeneous multinationals that can shift income using both debt and transfer prices. Countries with weak institutional quality can be made worse off adopting...

This paper employs unique data on export transactions and corporate tax returns of UK multinational firms and finds that firms manipulate their transfer prices to shift profits to lowertaxed destinations. It uncovers three new findings on tax-motivated transfer mispricing in real goods. First,...

This paper analyzes incentives of a multinational enterprise to manipulate an internal transfer price to take advantage of corporate-tax differences across countries under both monopoly and oligopoly. We examine "cost plus" and "comparable uncontrollable price" as two alternative implementations...