International corporate tax issues are now prominent in public debate, most notably with the current G20-OECD project addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (‘BEPS'). But, while there is considerable empirical evidence for advanced countries on the cross-country fiscal externalities at...

In its 2015 Final Report on “Measuring and Monitoring BEPS, Action 11”, the OECD introduced six indicators to quantify and evaluate base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) activity over time. In this study, we revisit three selected indicators, provide a numerical update for recent periods...

In July 2013 the OECD, to tackle multinational tax avoidance, published its Action Plan against base erosion and profit shifting. The Action Plan suggests a variety of legislative and administrative measures to eliminate frictions from interactions between domestic tax laws and international tax...

The integration of world capital markets carries important implications for the design and impact of tax policies. This paper evaluates research findings on international taxation, drawing attention to connections and inconsistencies between theoretical and empirical observations. Diamond and...

The issue of tax-motivated income shifting within multinational firms has attracted increasing global attention in recent years. It is of central importance to many current policy debates, including those related to recent initiatives by the OECD on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) and to...

This paper discusses the issue of profit shifting and “aggressive” tax planning by multinational firms. The paper makes two contributions. First, it provides some background information to the debate by giving a brief overview of existing empirical studies on profit shifting and by...

There is a growing concern that governments lose substantial corporate tax revenue because of profit shifting through transfer-pricing and thin-capitalization strategies. Existing literature studies profit shifting and transfer pricing separately. In practice, the choice of debt-to-asset ratios...

We use a global dataset with information on 210,000 corporations in 102 countries to investigate whether cross-border profit shifting by multinational firms is more prevalent in less developed countries. We propose a novel technique to study aggressive profit shifting and improve the credibility...

By exploiting country-by-country reports (CBCRs) prepared according to the OECD BEPS Action 13's minimum standards and voluntarily published by multinational corporations (MNCs), we show that the CBCR data can be used to identify how much MNCs pay in taxes and where, as well as how important tax...