Wealth transfer taxes can be important instruments to counter increasing wealth inequality. Yet, inter-generational business transfers, whose distribution is particularly concentrated at the top, are inherently difficult to tax. Many countries treat this asset class preferentially to avoid...

We exploit the 2017 US tax reform to learn about the tax-competitiveness of US multinational corporations (MNCs) relative to their international peers. Matching on the propensity score, we compare pairs of similar US and European firms listed on the S&P500 or StoxxEurope600 in a...

We model the interaction between the informal credit market and the act of tax collection by the government; in presence and functioning of the informal credit market, the agents (the tax paying firms) engage in false or sham litigation and deferred tax payments. During the litigation period...

On November 8, 2016, the Indian government made a surprise announcement that certain currency notes (representing 86% of the currency then in circulation) would no longer be legal tender (although they could be deposited in banks over a limited period). The stated reason for this sudden...

Tax law is often uncertain. In particular, the use of tax shelters tends to be in the "grey area" between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. In this paper I show that uncertainty in tax law can help achieve higher efficiency than allowing or disallowing a tax shelter with certainty....

This paper estimates the size and macroeconomic effects of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) using a computable general equilibrium model designed for corporate taxation and multinationals. Our central estimate of the impact of BEPS on corporate tax losses for the EU amounts to €36...

We develop a tax competition model that allows for the setting of both an origin-based and a destination-based commodity tax rate in the presence of avoidance and evasion. In the presence of evasion, jurisdictions will give cross-border shoppers tax preferential treatment, thus not fully...

We develop a positive model of multinational firm behavior and analyze a firm’s incentive to transfer an intellectual property (IP) right of uncertain value offshore ex ante, i.e. before its success or failure is realized. With an asymmetric treatment of losses in the home country, the...

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...

This paper is the first to use information from individual country-by-country (CbC) re-ports to assess the extent of profit shifting by multinational enterprises. Unlike other data often used to evaluate the extent of profit shifting and tax avoidance, CbC reports pro-vide a complete coverage of...