The current system of taxing the income of multinational firms in the United States is flawed across multiple dimensions. The system provides an artificial tax incentive to earn income in low-tax countries, rewards aggressive tax planning, and is not compatible with any common metrics of...

Most observers would agree that globalization can in principle be a positive phenomenon and aid human development even if they disagree about the extent to which the current wave of globalization has in fact been helpful. A key issue in these debates is the extent to which globalization widens...

On April 26, 2017, President Trump issued a one-page tax reform outline that included “territoriality,” i.e., exempting from tax dividends from the non-Subpart F income of controlled foreign corporations. Territoriality is also included in the House GOP “Better Way” Blueprint and was...

President Trump has decreed that for every new regulation, two old regulations should be repealed. The next time the IRS wishes to adopt a new tax regulation, I have two candidates for repeal: cost sharing and “check the box”, the 1997 regulation that enables US-based multinationals to shift...

Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017), is, in some respects, the anti-Piketty. Scheidel accepts Piketty's view that inequality tends to grow over time, but adds a...

The new OECD Multilateral Instrument to amend tax treaties (MLI) is an important innovation in international law. Hitherto, international economic law was built primarily on bilateral treaties (e.g., tax treaties and BITs) or multilateral treaties (the WTO agreements). The problem is that in...

Since the SCM agreement was enacted in 1995, the global leadership in the field of STZs has shifted from the OECD to the WTO. The WTO general agreement includes a broad set of policy goals that goes beyond trade relationships, but its legal framework has been systematically narrowed to the task...

The 2017 tax legislation brought sweeping changes to the rules for taxing individuals and business, the deductibility of state and local taxes, and the international tax regime. The complex legislation was drafted and passed through a rushed and secretive process intended to limit public comment...

Twenty years ago I wrote “Globalization, Tax Competition, and the Fiscal Crisis of the Welfare State” (113 Harv. L. Rev. 1573 (2000)), which argued that “[t]he current age of globalization can be distinguished from the previous one (from 1870 to 1914) by the much higher mobility of capital...

In late 2008, as financial markets were crashing, the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment launched the Columbia FDI Perspectives. The first Perspective, entitled “The FDI recession has begun,” correctly forecast an FDI recession in the following year. From that first...