Abstract This paper provides a brief review of the academic literature that assesses the quantitative importance of tax avoidance behaviour of multinational entities (MNEs) by means of income shifting from high-tax to low-tax affiliates. Existing studies unanimously report evidence in line with...

This paper presents a new approach to estimating the existence and magnitude of tax-motivated income shifting within multinational corporations. Existing studies of income shifting use changes in corporate tax rates as a source of identification. In contrast, this paper exploits exogenous...

This paper stresses the special role of multinational headquarters in corporate profit shifting strategies. Using a large panel of European firms, we show that multinational enterprises (MNEs) are reluctant to shift profits away from their headquarters even if these are located in high-tax...