We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pandemic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Exploiting within-country variation, we show that a one standard deviation increase in social capital leads to...

This article discusses the effects of taxation on the discrete choice of alternative projects. In particular, it is shown that if taxation affects the optimal timing of irreversible investment, then the discrete choice is distorted as well. This result has both methodological and political...

Measuring effective tax rates using tax revenue data is attractive, given that revenues collected capture the net effect of tax provisions and taxpayer behaviour that are difficult to model. Yet reliance on aggregate tax and income data requires restrictive assumptions and significantly limits...

The paper has three aims. First, it presents the specific forward-looking methodology applied in the quantitative analysis undertaken in the Commission study, and discusses how it is able to overcome some of the most important limitations of the traditional King Fullerton approach. Second, it...

This study provides a survey on corporate taxes around the world. Our analysis has three main objectives. First, we collect tax data and calculate (forward-looking) effective tax measures for a large sample of countries and recent years. We particularly describe how these measures vary over time...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on the impact of company taxes on the allocation of foreign direct investment. We make the outcomes of 25 empirical studies comparable by computing the tax rate elasticity under a uniform definition. The mean value of the tax rate elasticity in the...

Forward looking measures like the well-known effective marginal tax rate developed by King and Fullerton (1984) are often criticized for not taking into account the complexity of the tax law. This paper derives a method of evaluating this kind of measure and of quantifying the bias resulting...

The paper analyzes the financial structure of outbound FDI during the period 1996-2002 by drawing on up to 54,022 firm-year observations of 13,758 German-owned subsidiaries. We find that the tax rate in the host country has a sizeable and significantly positive effect on leverage for...

Most studies of tax competition and the race to the bottom focus on potential host countries competing for mobile capital, neglecting the role of corporate tax planning and of home governments that facilitate this planning. This neglect in part reflects the narrow view frequently taken of the...

This paper analyses the development of the ratio of corporate taxes to wage taxes using a simple political economy model with internationally mobile and immobile firms. Among other results, our model predicts that countries reduce their corporate tax rate, relative to the wage tax, either when...