This paper reviews the economic effects of the EU Savings Taxation Directive. The Directive aims at enabling taxation of foreign interest payments received by individuals in accordance with the rules of their State of residence. The data suggest that the Directive, which is based on automatic...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

In Europe, declining corporate tax rates have come along with rising tax-to-GDP ratios. This paper explores to what extent income shifting from the personal to the corporate tax base can explain these diverging developments. We exploit a panel of European data on legal form of business to...

The current debate in corporate taxation is focusing on leveling the tax playing field within the European Union for companies operating across-countries. However, tax burdens could also vary with the size of companies within the same country, raising the question whether large companies pay...

Environmental protection is one of Europe's key values. The EU has set clear policy objectives to achieve its environmental goals. The EU has favoured market-based instruments, among which fiscal instruments to tackle the climate change problem. This paper takes a policy-making perspective and...

This paper presents a model of a multinational firm’s optimal debt policy that incorporates international taxation factors. The model yields the prediction that a multinational firm’s indebtedness in a country depends on a weighted average of national tax rates and differences between...

Using a large international firm-level data set, we estimate separate effects of host and parent country taxation on the location decisions of multinational firms. Both types of taxation are estimated to have a negative impact on the location of new foreign subsidiaries. In fact, the impact of...

As any non-lump-sum tax, corporate income taxation creates distortions in economic choices, reducing its efficiency. This paper reviews some of these domestic and international distortions and their most recent estimates from the economic literature. Distortions originating from income shifting...

This paper studies the link between corporate income tax (CIT) reforms and domestic banks’ financing decisions. We use a dataset of CIT reforms and estimate the effect of tax rate changes on leverage, dividend policies and earnings management of banks. The results suggest that taxation...

The use of receipt-based tax lotteries to increase (VAT) tax compliance has been of growing interest amongst EU Member States. Some countries have introduced such lottery schemes, namely Malta in 1997, Slovakia in 2013 and Portugal in 2014. Others have been intrigued about the possibility of...