If conventional instruments of strategic trade policy are unavailable, the system of foreign profit taxation and transfer price guidelines may serve as surrogate policy instruments. In this paper, I consider a model where firms from two countries compete with each other on a third market. I...

Recent empirical studies find that foreign direct investment (FDI) by a multinational firm is not associated with a reduction of the firm's domestic activities. As it is often argued, this finding may imply that a country should not tax the firm's foreign profit income since this reduces foreign...

I consider a continuum of multinational enterprises (MNEs), which differ in profitability. MNEs employ capital, shift profit to tax havens and may relocate their production facilities to other countries. Source countries provide public inputs and levy taxes. I derive optimal policy choices for...

Many federal tax systems employ formula apportionment to allocate the taxable profits of large businesses to the federal subunits, where the subunits' specific tax rates are then applied. The formulas - such as the one recently proposed by the EU Commission and the one agreed upon by the...

In this paper, we consider optimal tax enforcement policy in the presence of profit shifting towards tax havens. We show that, under separate accounting, tax enforcement levels may be too high due to negative fiscal externalities. In contrast, under formula apportionment, tax enforcement is...

In this paper, we analyze tax competition in a model where investor firms have the choice between two types of investment, greenfield investment and mergers and acquisitions. We show that the coexistence of these two types of investment intensifies tax competition in comparison to the case where...