The paper examines 157 German listed corporations that had the option of changing their fiscal year to achieve a possible tax reduction in connection with the major tax reform of 2000/2001. The tax reduction from a change was larger, the larger the expected profits. However, with costs of...

The Savings Directive has been celebrated as a major political break-through in coordinating taxation in Europe. Against this background, the present paper evaluates the real-world effects of this directive. The directive has left a loophole by providing grandfathering (exemption from...

Tax neutrality towards alternative financing instruments for corporate investment is a ubiquitous demand in the political debate. At the same time, the literature is surprisingly silent about the magnitude of possible efficiency costs of a departure from tax neutrality. Against this background,...

By granting intracompany loans to their foreign affiliates, multinational firms may reduce their tax liability abroad. Many countries have legislated thin-capitalization rules (TCRs) that limit the allowable levels of intracompany loans or restrict interest deductibility if certain thresholds...

The paper evaluates the working of German CFC rules that restrict the use of foreign subsidiaries located in low-tax countries to shelter passive investment income from home taxation. While passive investments make up a significant fraction of German outbound FDI, we find that German CFC rules...

This paper provides empirical evidence on two potential costs of shared ownership of German affiliates abroad. First, in periods of currency crises, wholly-owned affiliates, in contrast to partially-owned affiliates, seem to circumvent financial constraints by accessing capital from their parent...

In this study, we estimate the impacts of differences in international tax rates on the probability of choosing a location for an affiliate of a multinational firm. In particular, we distinguish between the tax sensitivity of Greenfield and M&A investments. Based on a novel firm-level dataset on...

We introduce tax competition for mobile labor into an optimal-taxation model with two skill levels. We analyze a symmetric subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium of the game between two governments and two taxpayer populations. Tax competition reduces the distortion from the informational asymmetry...

In some countries, a sizable fraction of savings is derived from corporate savings. Although larger, traded corporations are often co-owned by foreign portfolio investors, current international accounting standards allocate all corporate savings to the host country. This paper suggests a...

Steueroasen besitzen drei wichtige Merkmale, die aus der Sicht von Steuerhinterziehern und Steuervermeidern anderer Länder besondere Anziehungskraft haben. Sie bieten niedrige Steuersätze für alle oder für bestimmte Kapitaleinkommen. Sie weisen eine hohe politische Stabilität und...