The paper discusses the harmonization of value added tax rates in the European Community1s internal market from a legal and from an economic viewpoint. There is a fundamental trade-off between the goal of avoiding tax-induced distortions in EC commodity trade and the aim to maintain national...

This paper analyses tax competition between a unionised and a non-unionised country for the location of an outside firm. We show that unionisation offers an extra incentive for the government to attract a foreign competitor to a concentrated domestic market, in order to affect the behaviour of...

We study the optimal combination of corporate tax rate and tax base in a model of a small open economy with heterogeneous firms. We show that it is optimal for the small country's government to effectively subsidize capital inputs by granting a tax allowance in excess of the true costs of...

Following recent court rulings, cross-border loss compensation for multinational firms will likely be introduced, at least in Europe. This paper analyzes the effects of introducing a coordinated cross-border tax relief in a setting where multinational firms choose the size of a risky investment...

The tax competition for mobile capital, in particular the reluctance of small countries to agree on measures of tax coordination, has ongoing political and economic fallouts within Europe. We analyse the effects of introducing a two tier structure of capital taxation, where the asymmetric member...