This paper examines the role of personal income taxes in multinationals’ corporate tax–induced profit shifting. As required by corporate tax rules in most countries, firms need economic substance in low–corporate tax countries to justify profit shifting to these countries. Because higher...

For over a century, politicians, government officials and scholars in the United States have debated whether corporate tax returns, which are currently subject to broad tax privacy protections, should be publicly accessible. The ongoing global discussion of base erosion and profit shifting by...

We use a shock to the public scrutiny of firm subsidiary locations to investigate whether that scrutiny leads to changes in firms' disclosure and corporate tax avoidance behavior. ActionAid International, a non-profit activist group, levied public pressure on noncompliant U.K. firms in the FTSE...

This paper analyzes corporate tax evasion in a principal-agent model with multitasking. A firm-owner hires a specialist tax manager who chooses the quantity as well as the quality of tax evasion. Higher quality is a form of self-insurance and lowers the firm's expected fine for tax evasion. In...

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...

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...

Effective tax rates (ETRs) estimated from the balance sheet data of multinational corporations (MNCs) are useful for comparing MNCs' corporate income taxation across countries. In this paper we propose a new methodological approach to estimate ETRs as reliably and as for as many countries as...

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...