Using aggregate data on U.S. multinational firms' activities, we document the impact of tax havens on the organization and trade of multinational firms. Conventional wisdom says that MNEs set up foreign sales platforms close to large markets to benefit from the proximity to consumers. We show,...

This paper is the first to use information from individual country-by-country (CbC) re-ports to assess the extent of profit shifting by multinational enterprises. Unlike other data often used to evaluate the extent of profit shifting and tax avoidance, CbC reports pro-vide a complete coverage of...

This paper is the first to use information from individual country-by-country (CbC) re-ports to assess the extent of profit shifting by multinational enterprises. Unlike other data often used to evaluate the extent of profit shifting and tax avoidance, CbC reports pro-vide a complete coverage of...

German municipalities levy local business taxes by choosing a tax rate to apply to local business income, where the tax base is defined uniformly at the national level. Before the federal government's imposition of a minimum tax rate in 2004, some municipalities such as the tiny North Sea town...

Tax fraud is a serious problem for fiscal authorities worldwide, not only in countries regarded as "hightax" like Germany. Besides longterm tax reforms, tax amnesties are used to bring back taxable amounts into the legal sector. The German tax amnesty of 2004/2005 was one of the last examples in...

Weltweit ist fast jedes zweite Unternehmen von Wirtschaftskriminalität betroffen. Neben einem Vertrauensverlust und Reputationsschäden führt Wirtschaftskriminalität zu finanziellen Einbußen und erheblichem Mehraufwand für Ermittlungen, Folge- und Präventionsmaßnahmen. Zur Reduktion von...

This paper investigates firms’ responses to threshold-dependent intensity of tax enforcement. We use administrative tax return data over the entire population of German firms and exploit industry variation in firm size thresholds applied by the tax administration. In our setting, each...

This paper examines the issue of the ethics of tax evasion. It begins with a review of the literature and proceeds to discuss the three main views on the issue that have emerged over the last 500 years. The paper then reports on the results of a series of surveys taken of various populations in...

"Wer nicht mit uns geht, sondern mit den reaktionären Kräften, wird in unserer Zone rücksichtslos liquidiert und vernichtet ...", so der SED-Chef von Leipzig, Lohagen, am 9. Oktober 1947. Die Devise der Stalinisten der ersten Stunde war deutlich. In der Folge verschwanden viele erfolgreiche...

It is well known that after the First World War there was a massive flight of capital from the major European countries to foreign financial centres. It is surprising, however, to note that no historian to date has actually taken the trouble to make a detailed study of the phenomenon. The aim of...