If we want to narrow the North-South divide that threatens our world, some limits on tax competition are inevitable. The world faces a crucial choice in the 2020s. We can either continue retreating from globalization in favor of xenophobic nationalism, tariffs, immigration restrictions, and...

A recent NY Times headline summarizes one of the biggest economic impacts of the current pandemic: “Big Tech Could Emerge From Coronavirus Crisis Stronger Than Ever.” At a time when most American citizens and businesses suffer catastrophic economic damage from the Coronavirus Recession, some...

US international tax law is commonly conceived as developed in the US and influencing the development of other countries' international tax law. This paper will argue that in the case of the TCJA, the US legislation was heavily influenced by the OECD BEPS project, and that the continuing OECD...

The current system of taxing the income of multinational firms in the United States is flawed across multiple dimensions. The system provides an artificial tax incentive to earn income in low-tax countries, rewards aggressive tax planning, and is not compatible with any common metrics of...

Most observers would agree that globalization can in principle be a positive phenomenon and aid human development even if they disagree about the extent to which the current wave of globalization has in fact been helpful. A key issue in these debates is the extent to which globalization widens...

On April 26, 2017, President Trump issued a one-page tax reform outline that included “territoriality,” i.e., exempting from tax dividends from the non-Subpart F income of controlled foreign corporations. Territoriality is also included in the House GOP “Better Way” Blueprint and was...

President Trump has decreed that for every new regulation, two old regulations should be repealed. The next time the IRS wishes to adopt a new tax regulation, I have two candidates for repeal: cost sharing and “check the box”, the 1997 regulation that enables US-based multinationals to shift...

Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017), is, in some respects, the anti-Piketty. Scheidel accepts Piketty's view that inequality tends to grow over time, but adds a...

The new OECD Multilateral Instrument to amend tax treaties (MLI) is an important innovation in international law. Hitherto, international economic law was built primarily on bilateral treaties (e.g., tax treaties and BITs) or multilateral treaties (the WTO agreements). The problem is that in...

Since the SCM agreement was enacted in 1995, the global leadership in the field of STZs has shifted from the OECD to the WTO. The WTO general agreement includes a broad set of policy goals that goes beyond trade relationships, but its legal framework has been systematically narrowed to the task...