Out of all double tax treaties (DTTs) in force in 2012, around 41% are symmetric and 59% are asymmetric, i.e., they prescribe different dividend withholding tax rates (WTRs) depending on the foreign investor's ownership fraction. The paper investigates the reasons for this phenomenon, namely why...

The existing theoretical literature on fiscal competition has to a large extent ignored the role of government debt as a determinant of taxes and productive public spending. We develop a simple model of fiscal competition with government borrowing. If a default on government debt is no option,...

The implications of high indebtedness for strategic tax setting in internationally integrated capital markets have found little attention so far. We analyze when and how changes in initial debt levels affect the distribution of economic activity across space. When public borrowing is...

In a multi-country general equilibrium economy with mobile capital and rigidwage unemployment, countries may differ in capital endowments, production technologies and rigid wages. Governments tax capital at the source to maximize national welfare. They account for tax base responses to their tax...

In a multi-country general equilibrium economy with mobile capital and rigid-wage unemployment, countries may differ in capital endowments, production technologies and rigid wages. Governments tax capital at the source to maximize national welfare. They account for tax base responses to their...

In a multi-country general equilibrium economy with mobile capital and rigid-wage unemployment, countries may differ in capital endowments, production technologies and rigid wages. Governments tax capital at the source to maximize national welfare. They account for tax base responses to their...

This study investigates the impact of residence country’s double tax relief method and of tax sparing agreements, on the difference between developing countries’ withholding taxes under domestic law, and negotiated withholding taxes in tax treaties with OECD member states. Using a dyadic...

Much of the foreign direct investment worldwide is affected by one of more than 3000 bilateral tax treaties. There is an agreement that dividend and interest payments respond to these tax treaties' provisions, but evidence is scarce as to the magnitude of this response. We aim to fill in this...

Tax treaties between countries influence how much tax revenues governments receive from multinational enterprises. These treaties often reduce the withholding tax rates on outgoing dividend and interest payments. We provide illustrative estimates of costs for these two taxes for 14 developing...

In this paper, we analyse the role of mobility in tax and subsidy competition. Our primary result is that increasing "relocation" mobility of firms leads to increasing "net" tax revenues under fairly weak conditions. While enhanced relocation mobility intensifies tax competition, it weakens...