In the debate on the impact of illicit capital flows on developing countries, the view is widespread that profit shifting to low tax jurisdictions undermines the ability of developing countries to raise tax revenue. While the shifting of income out of developed countries is a widely debated...

This paper measures the relative importance of quality and quantity effects of corporate taxation on foreign direct investment. Quantity is affected if corporate taxes reduce the equilibrium stock of foreign capital in a given country. Quality effects arise if taxes decrease the extent to which...

In recent years several countries have augmented their national tax laws by transfer pricing legislations which intend to limit the leeway of multinational firms to exploit international corporate tax rate diverences and relocate profit to low-tax affiliates by distorting intra-firm transfer...

An increase in the taxation of foreign a¢ liates reduces domestic investment, as has recently been empirically shown in Becker and Riedel (2012). This paper investigates the implication of this ?nding for tax competition. It is shown that an increase in the number of multinational ?rms (in...

This paper examines the impact of tax incentives on corporate research and development (R&D) activity. Traditionally, R&D tax incentives have been provided in the form of special tax allowances and tax credits. In recent years, several countries moreover reduced their income tax rates on R&D...

This paper assesses the agglomeration pattern of four-digit industries in Germany using a rich data set on the population of German firms. To identify geographical agglomeration, we follow the distance based approach of Duranton and Overman (2005) and find that the location pattern of 78% of our...

This paper investigates whether corporate taxation affects the location of patents within a multinational group. We exploit a unique dataset which links patent data from the European Patent Office to micro panel data on European firms for 1995-2003. Our results suggest that the host country’s...

This paper investigates corporate taxation under separate accounting (SA) and formula apportionment (FA) in a model with union wage bargaining and multinational firms. Under SA, we find that increases in the corporate tax rate raise the wage level of domestic workers, while they lower the...

This paper investigates whether the institution of life time tenure for public sector employees affects the selection of workers into private and public sector occupation. Precisely, we argue that more generous employment protection for public sector employees may induce risk averse individuals...

We use a laboratory experiment to investigate the behavioral effects of obligations that are not backed by binding deterrent incentives. To implement such `expressive law' we introduce different levels of very weakly incentivized, symmetric and asymmetric minimum contribution levels...