This paper investigates the consequences of a series of alternative international tax designs on the strategy of a multinational enterprise regarding the cross border distribution of its investment and the choice of its financing behavior. We start with a world where no international tax rules...

Increasingly linked by regional and global ties, national economies depend more than ever on international investments and trade. While trade and investment have become international, however, taxation has remained national, preserving and strengthening one of the few remaining barriers to...

The terms “enterprise,” “business” and “business profits” are ubiquitous in U.S. and international tax law yet they are often ill-defined and under-theorized, especially in their interaction with other regulatory areas. This U.S. Report, commissioned for a comparative volume on the...

This study investigates the impact of residence country’s double tax relief method and of tax sparing agreements, on the difference between developing countries’ withholding taxes under domestic law, and negotiated withholding taxes in tax treaties with OECD member states. Using a dyadic...

In December 2017, Congress passed major tax reform. The reform included an important new provision that grants independent contractors and other passthrough taxpayers, but not employees or corporations, a potential tax deduction equal to 20% of their qualified business income. Critics have...

The last time someone wrote comprehensively about permanent establishment in the United States, the catchwords of the day were Mayaguez, Watergate, and Squeaky Fromme. At that time, there were only nine U.S. cases and thirteen revenue rulings addressing permanent establishment. Perhaps not...

This paper introduces a new dataset that codes the content of 519 tax treaties signed by low- and lower-middle-income countries in Africa and Asia. Often called Double Taxation Agreements, bilateral tax treaties divide up the right to tax cross-border economic activity between their two...

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the attention given to abusive tax schemes that take advantage of bilateral tax treaties. The ensuing discourse tends to view potential responses to treaty abuses as a hierarchical set of options, gradually escalating, in which treaty termination is...

This paper — prepared for a symposium held at Brooklyn Law School on October 23, 2015 on Reconsidering the Tax Treaty — addresses the treaty compatibility aspect of proposals for reforming the U.S. international tax system. Finding that a reform proposal is treaty compatible obviates the...

This letter responds to the request in Notice 2017-28 for public comment on recommendations for items that should be included on the 2017-2018 Priority Guidance Plan. Recommendations in this letter cover various treaty abuse situations