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...

Recent empirical studies find that foreign direct investment (FDI) by a multinational firm is not associated with a reduction of the firm’s domestic activities. As it is often argued, this finding may imply that a country should not tax the firm’s foreign profit income since this reduces...

Many countries have introduced patent box regimes in recent years, offering a reduced tax rate to businesses for their IP-related income. Patent boxes are supposed to increase innovative activity, but they are also suspected to aim at attracting inward profit shifting from multinational...

How did the rise of multinational enterprises (MNEs) put pressure on the prevailing international corporate tax framework? MNEs, and firms with market power, are not new phenomena, nor is the corporate income tax, which dates to the early 20th century. This prompts the question, what is...

Base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) undermines tax revenues collection and raises public discontent in times when the tax burden has increased significantly for households in most developed economies. In addition, new forms of profit shifting related to intangible investment have emerged...

The increasing use of intellectual property as a means to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions or jurisdictions with so-called "patent boxes" is a major challenge for the corporate tax base of medium- and high-tax countries. Extending a standard tax competition model for capital-enhancing...

Cederwall discusses the Tax Foundation's virtual colloquium, "Making Sense of Profit Shifting" — featuring 18 leading tax scholars, practitioners, and policy experts — and explains how it reveals six significant themes of incongruence in the understanding of profit shifting. Cederwall...

Almost 140 countries have agreed to reallocate the rights to tax international corporate profits and to introduce minimum tax rates. The agreed plan is the product of pragmatism and a search for consensus, but ambitious. It includes steps towards unitary taxation to be established by a...

Many countries have introduced patent box regimes in recent years, offering a reduced tax rate to businesses for their IP-related income. In this paper, we analyze the effects of patent box regimes when countries can simultaneously use patent boxes and R&D subsidies to promote innovation. We...

The Global Minimum Tax (GMT) is applied only to firms above a certain size threshold, permitting countries to set differential tax rates for small and large firms. We analyse tax competition between a tax haven and a non-haven country for heterogeneous multinationals to evaluate the effects of...