In "Understanding the AMT, and Its Unadopted Sibling, the AMxT." J. Legal Analysis (Advance Access: October 8, 2014), Jim Hines and Kyle Logue propose an interesting new theory about why the US has an Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The function of the AMT, they propose, is to enable Congress to...

This article will survey the great consumption vs. income tax debate from a historical perspective. The focus here is not on which tax base is better, but rather on how this debate evolved over time inside and outside legal academia. As we shall see, there was one point in which the consumption...

The OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project promises to bring about the most fundamental changes in the international tax regime since its inception in the 1920s. The fundamental idea behind the various BEPS projects is that the OECD has fully embraced the idea that double...

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...

Eduardo Baistrocchi's outstanding new book on tax treaty disputes is the result of an intense five-year global collaborative project among international tax scholars, practitioners and administrators. The book provides an unprecedented set of information and offers the first global qualitative...

The “Unified Framework for Fixing Our Broken Tax Code” (the “Framework”) released by the “Big Six” group of Treasury, White House and Congressional leaders on September 27 has been the focus of a lot of commentary. Most of the comments have focused on the distributive aspects of the...

The international tax regime is almost a hundred years old. The two principles it is based on (the benefits principle and the single tax principle) were developed in the 1920s and 1930s. The regime functioned reasonable well until the 1980s, where globalization led to tax competition that...

In recent years, various US international tax proposals have been advanced on the basis that we should follow the lead of our major trading partners. For example, it has been argued that we should adopt a “territorial” tax system (really, an exemption for dividends from controlled...