Is corporate tax competition a threat to democracy in the EU? The answer depends crucially on a positive analysis of the effects of tax competition on national policy autonomy. Most analyses focus on direct effects on corporate tax rates and revenues. We contend that this focus is too narrow. It...

We show that tax competition in the EU is shaped by four interrelated institutional mechanisms: 1) Market integration, by reducing the transaction costs of cross-border tax arbitrage in the Single Market, 2) enlargement, by increasing the number and heterogeneity of states involved in intra-EU...

There are basically three stories about the globalisation-welfare state nexus. The first story argues that globalisation is the cause of the chronic crisis of the welfare state. As national economies open to the international market, governments are forced to adapt to the imperatives of global...

How does globalisation affect taxation? The academic wisdom is split on this question. Some argue that globalisation spells the beginning of the end of the national tax state while others maintain that it hardly constrains tax policy choices at all. This paper comes down in the middle. It finds...

The paper analyzes the common assumption that the EU has little power over taxation. We find that the EU's own taxing power is indeed narrowly circumscribed: its revenues have evolved from rather supranational beginnings in the 1950s towards an increasingly intergovernmental system. Based on a...

Recent research has shown that regulatory competition does not necessarily lead to downward pressures on regulation, but may at times also push the level of regulation upwards. Extending David Vogel's California effect argument, this paper shows that such upward pressure may not only result...

Does globalization undermine the fiscal basis of the welfare state? The conventional wisdom believes so: open borders cause tax competition, which in turn leads to a race to the bottom in capital taxation. However, the data show that revenues from capital taxation are fairly stable in OECD...

Does globalization undermine the fiscal basis of the welfare state? The conventional wisdom believes so: open borders invite tax competition, which in turn erodes the revenues from capital taxation. However, there is little evidence to support this view. The data show that revenues from capital...

Das Vorhaben, über das hier zu berichten ist, geht auf eine Anregung des Max-Planck-Instituts für Gesellschaftsforschung (MPIfG) im Frühjahr 2003 zurück, die von der VolkswagenStiftung aufgegriffen und als Projekt finanziell gefördert wurde. Ausgangspunkt war die Beobachtung, dass in den...