Internal debt financing can be used by multinational firms to shift profits from high-tax to low-tax countries. Governments apply thin capitalization rules (TCRs), which limit the deductibility of interest expenses, to restrict this behavior. TCRs fall in two main categories: safe haven rules...

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

This testimony makes three main points. First, income volatility, especially when it involves income declines, imposes significant hardships on American families. It heightens stress about finances and may increase household living expenses. These hardships are most pronounced for middle-and...

Der wirtschaftliche Aufholprozeß der neuen Bundesländer wird von der Bundesregierung u.a. durch Investitionszulagen unterstützt. Um möglichst zielgenau zu fördern, wird im Investitionszulagengesetz festgelegt, was und in welcher Höhe gefördert werden kann. Dazu sieht das Gesetz sehr...

It is usually a straightforward tax question: is an advance of capital to a business debt or equity? But in some cases the question gets harder to answer, mostly because of the tangled multi-factor test we use. Long ago most tax practitioners gave up trying to clean up the process of answering...

Literature provides evidence of profit shifting of MNEs, particularly by intercompany debt. Therefore, we conducted a broad empirical investigation (survey), focusing on specific issues regarding cross-border intra-group financial transactions. This paper aims to work out empirical evidence of...

The paper provides estimates of the long-run, tax-adjusted, user cost elasticity of capital (UCE) in a small open economy, exploiting three sources of variation in Canadian tax policy: across provinces, industries, and years. Estimates of the UCE with Canadian data are less prone to the...

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...

We investigate the outcome of bilateral tax competition by analyzing Double Tax Treaties (DTT). DTTs are the crucial means of splitting a tax base between two countries. Yet, there are only few empirical results on the textual design of DTTs. We develop a novel approach to quantitatively analyze...

The present study provides estimates of the Effective Marginal Tax Rates (EMTRs) for a sample of 17 OECD countries and 11 manufacturing sectors in a single framework encompassing capital, labour and energy taxes. Our cross-country/cross-sector approach allows us comparing the incentives provided...