Macro-based summary indicators of effective tax burdens cannot provide information on the level or distribution of the marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in effective tax rates facing different subgroups of the population....

We develop a new methodology to decompose the observed decline in multinational corporations' (MNCs') effective tax rates into profit shifting to tax havens and several other components. We apply this methodology to the best available data for MNCs headquartered in the US - from the Bureau of...