Using administrative tax records for UK businesses, we document both bunching in annual turnover below the VAT registration threshold and persistent voluntary registration by almost half of the firms below the threshold. We develop a conceptual framework that can simultaneously explain these two...

This paper presents a comprehensive review and analysis of tax harmonization and tax competition in the European Union. It is shown that while tax burdens in the European Union have increased substantially in the past 35 years, they did not converge. Also, there is no evidence of the 'race to...

With economic integration rapidly growing at all level, understanding the incentives that this provides in the design of fiscal policies at the national level is fundamental. The most obvious implication of international competition on the taxation of mobile factors is a race to the bottom in...

Previous research has shown that Tiebout-style fiscal competition among local governments reduces the likelihood of adopting income taxes. This literature has not yet considered the impact of yardstick competition on tax instrument choice. This paper employs spatial econometrics to test for...

In this paper we consider two regions competing for the larger part of the investment by a mobile firm whose decision is based on the quality of human capital in each region. This in turn depends on the initial skill level and the amount of higher education in the region, with a possible...

In this paper we investigate tax/subsidy competition for FDI between countries of different size when a domestic firm is the incumbent in the largest market. We investigate how the nature (public or private) of the incumbent firm affects policy competition between the two governments seeking to...

This paper studies policy competition for a foreign-owned multiproduct monopolist firm producing two products that are horizontally differentiated between two countries of different size. We show that the equilibrium outcome of FDI competition is determined by the interaction between the market...

The term “competitiveness” is a highly elastic concept that has been used in a myriad of different ways. However, in discussions of the connection between international taxation and competitiveness, there are two conceptions of competitiveness that are frequently used, but are not always...

Numerous (high-tax) countries presume that multinational firms use their transfer-pricing policies to shift profits into countries with lower tax rates. To avoid the corresponding loss in tax revenues, tax authorities develop constantly tightening rules which limit the scope of transfer-price...

We examine how tax cuts that benefit some firms are related to the economic performance of their direct competitors. Consistent with tax cuts decreasing the cost of initiating competitive strategies, we find that a decrease in the tax burden for only a certain group of firms in the U.S. economy...