Abstract: Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. We study how business groups can substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. In a two period model, there is no contract enforcement in the first period. The firms...

In this paper the term ‘globalisation’ means the international integration of nationally organised markets in conjunction with increasing cross-country flows of factors of production. According to this globalisation has been under way for centuries. Globalisation is not a completely...

Heterogeneous firm productivity seems to provide an argument for governments to pursue 'pick-the-winner' strategies by subsidizing highly productive firms more, or taxing them less, than their less productive counterparts. We appraise this argument by studying the optimal choice of effective tax...

The paper compares non-cooperative commodity taxation under the destination and origin principles under a variety of different assumptions about market structure. We consider a model of international duopoly with either quantity or price competition of firms and either segmented or integrated...

In many situations governments have sector-specific tax and regulation policies at their disposal to influence the market outcome after a national or an international merger has taken place. In this paper we study the implications for merger policy when countries non-cooperatively deploy...

The paper challenges the 'orthodox doctrine' of collective choice theory according to which Arrow’s 'general possibility theorem' precludes rational decision procedures generally and implies that in particular all voting procedures must be flawed. I point out that all voting procedures are...

This paper analyses the effects of a regionally coordinated corporate income tax in a model with three active countries, one of which is not part of the union, and a globally mobile firm. We show that regional tax coordination can lead to two types of welfare gain. First, for investments that...

The Munich Re was founded in 1880 and is from the very start till this day one of the leading insurance companies in the world. Despite its long and successfull existance the company’s history has not been reported yet in a way that fulfilled scientific criteria. This paper can be seen as a...

An important puzzle in corporate taxation is that effective tax rates have fallen significantly while tax revenue has simultaneously risen in most countries. Moreover, the gross profitability of firms seems to be lower in high-tax countries, even though standard models of international...

This paper analyses capital tax competition between jurisdictions of different size when multinational firms can shift some fraction of their tax base between them. For the case of revenue maximizing governments, we show that introducing profit shifting will not generally increase downward...