Bilateral international tax treaties govern the host country taxation for the vast majority of the world’s foreign direct investment (FDI). Of particular interest is the fact that the tax rates used under these treaties are gradually falling although the treaties themselves do not specify any...

Tax treaties are often viewed as a mechanism for eliminating tax competition, however this approach ignores the need for bargaining over the treaty?s terms. This paper focuses on how bargaining can affect the withholding taxes set under the treaty. In a simple framework, we develop hypotheses...

Bilateral international tax treaties govern the host country taxation for the vast majority of the world’s foreign direct investment (FDI). Of particular interest is the fact that the tax rates used under these treaties are gradually falling although the treaties themselves do not specify any...

Tax treaties are often viewed as a mechanism for eliminating tax competition, however this approach ignores the need for bargaining over the treaty’s terms. This paper focuses on how bargaining can affect the withholding taxes set under the treaty. In a simple framework, we develop hypotheses...

Tax treaties are often viewed as a mechanism for eliminating tax competition, however, this approach ignores the need for bargaining over the treaty’s terms. This paper makes a first attempt at modeling the conflicting goals in treaty formation by analyzing a cooperative bargaining model...

This paper empirically examines whether expansion of the EU has increased international tax competition. To do so, we use a market potential weighting scheme to estimate the slope of best responses. We find robust evidence for tax competition. In particular, our estimates suggest that EU...

This paper uses affiliate level data from Swedish multinationals to examine the impact of tax treaties on both overall affiliate sales and the composition of those sales. In line with previous results, we find little evidence for an effect of treaties on the level of total sales. We do, however,...

The structure of a multinational firm, that is how its affiliates relate to one another, is critical for understanding where multinationals locate, how policy affects them, and their resilience to localized shocks. Here, we review the two main structures - market-seeking horizontal and...

I develop a simple model in which production of skill-intensive headquarter services are fragmented across borders in order to take advantage of complementarities between types of skilled labor. This setting indicates that FDI tends to come from and go to skill-abundant countries. It also yields...

Bilateral tax treaties are an important method of international tax cooperation. I survey the existing literature on these agreements, highlighting the differences between the standard view that treaties increase foreign direct investment and the empirical evidence that finds no such effect. I...