We use data from the U.S. Treasury corporate tax files for 1984 and 1992 to address two related questions concerning the investment decisions of U.S. multinational corporations. First, how sensitive are investment location decisions to tax rate differences across countries? And second, have...

In this paper, I attempt to bring the debate over deferral up to date. The paper is divided into three sections. The first starts with a review of traditional models of international tax systems to provide a basic understanding of the efficiency consequences of deferral. This section then...

Several investment-repatriation strategies are added to the standard model of a parent and its affiliate in which the affiliate is located in a low-tax country and is limited to two alternatives: repatriating taxable dividends to the parent or investing in its own real operations. In our model,...

The previous literature on multinational financial policy has, for the most part, been restricted to the choice between dividend distributions to the parent and further real investment in the foreign affiliate. We argue that investment in financial assets such as the debt and equity of related...

This paper examines the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the international location decisions of U.S. financial services firms. The Act included rule changes that made it substantially more difficult for U.S. firms to defer U.S. taxes on overseas financial services income held in low-tax...

We approach the question of how moving to a dividend exemption system would affect the location incentives of U.S. corporations from three different angles. We start by comparing the U.S. allocation of foreign direct investment in manufacturing across low-tax versus high-tax jurisdictions with...