In July 2013 the OECD, to tackle multinational tax avoidance, published its Action Plan against base erosion and profit shifting. The Action Plan suggests a variety of legislative and administrative measures to eliminate frictions from interactions between domestic tax laws and international tax...

The draft for a CCCTB Directive in the EU includes the suggestion for an apportionment formula which allocates taxable profits to group member corporations and to the respective Member States. The draft directive delegates the right to define one apportionment factor, the term ‘Employee’ to...

If interpreted in a strict legal sense, beneficial ownership rules in tax treaties would have no effect on conduit companies because companies at law own their property and income beneficially. Conversely, a company can never own anything in a substantive sense because economically a company is...

To what degree developing countries gain from signing double tax treaties is being hotly debated. In this paper, we analyze the Austrian tax treaty policy. Combining legal and economic perspectives, we find that developing countries are likely to expect both positive and negative impacts from...

This position paper of the IBFD Academic Task Force (hereinafter IBFD Task Force) relates to the OECD's work on BEPS Action 1 and is devoted to withholding tax aspects. This position paper provides possible solutions to the challenges presented to the international tax regime by the digital...

This paper outlines the core issues of the introduction of a new PE nexus based on digital presence. It puts forward its essential features and rethinks the foundations of the concept of sourcing for income tax purposes in the global economy. Our proposal of a new PE nexus based on digital...

Out of all double tax treaties (DTTs) in force in 2012, around 41% are symmetric and 59% are asymmetric, i.e., they prescribe different dividend withholding tax rates (WTRs) depending on the foreign investor's ownership fraction. The paper investigates the reasons for this phenomenon, namely why...

On 30 September 2017, the United Kingdom implemented a powerful new investigative tool known as an “unexplained wealth order” in its Criminal Finances Act 2017. On 7-8 November 2017, London hosted the Fifth OECD Forum on Tax and Crime. Against this background, as well as other recent...

We investigate the relation between international taxation and the organizational form of foreign direct investment (‘FDI’). Using micro-level data on inbound FDI relations in Germany, we find that a higher tax burden on income earned in a corporate subsidiary increases the probability that...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) under Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Action 2 indicated that tax arbitrage via hybrid mismatch arrangements “result in a substantial erosion of the taxable bases of the countries concerned” and “have an overall...