Illicit financial flows directly impact a country's ability to raise, retain, and mobilize its own resources to finance sustainable development. Against a backdrop of a weak public financial position attributed to capital flight, tax avoidance, and dependence on corporate income taxes,...

We study how large domestic firms and multinational corporations compare in their effective tax rates and whether there is evidence of profit shifting out of Uganda. Using administrative data from the Uganda Revenue Authority and regression analysis, we find that multinational corporations lower...

Illicit financial flows (IFFs) threaten countries' ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Progressing on the IFFs target is thus crucial, as is the ability to measure achieved progress. In this paper we explore how to best statistically measure tax avoidance by...

We use firm-level administrative data from Ecuador to study the implications of 'reverse withholding' for firms' tax behavior. Withholding does not affect tax liability of firms, but it may result in a discontinuity in the audit probability around the withholding threshold. Exploiting variation...

This paper estimates the effect of profit shifting on corporate tax base erosion for the United States. Using Bureau of Economic Analysis survey data on U.S. multinational corporations over the period 1983 to 2012, the analysis estimates the sensitivity of foreign incomes to tax burdens for...

In recent years, profit shifting by multinational companies has generated substantial revenue costs to the U.S. government. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) changed the climate for profit shifting in several important ways: the lower U.S. corporate rate should lower the incentive to shift...

One of the signature achievements of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project is the collection of multinational company country by country data, for government use in tax enforcement efforts. In late 2019, the United States became the first country to release a complete set of these...

The popular view is that governments should crack down on tax avoidance by multinational firms. In this paper, we analyze how anti-profit-shifting policies influence fiscal competition. Governments commit to profit shifting control effort and then set taxes on capital. Equilibrium tax rates are...

In this paper the authors analyze the existence of profit shifting by companies located in Spain. Using a sample of 1,380 Spanish subsidiaries owned by foreign OECD and EU parent companies from the AMADEUS Database for the period 2005-2014 and a simple tax rate difference as a measure of the...