This paper examines the impact of thin capitalization rules that limit the tax deductibility of interest on the capital structure of the foreign affiliates of US multinationals. We construct a new data set on thin capitalization rules in 54 countries for the period 1982-2004. Using confidential...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper summarizes the theory and empirical evidence on the determinants of foreign direct investment. These determinants include expected relative rates of return, risk diversification, market size, technological advantage, market failure, oligopolistic rivalry, liquidity, currency strength,...

Economists interested in location choices usually focus their attention on investments abroad. This neglects the fact that multinational enterprises continue to invest domestically while undertaking foreign expansion. This paper compares investments at home and abroad. Our firm-level dataset...

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...

Luxembourg receives ample investment from multinational corporations, in part due to some attractive features in its international tax rules. Around 95 percent of these foreign investments pass through Luxembourg via companies performing holding and/or intra-group financing activities. While...

Formula apportionment as a way to attribute taxable profits of multinationals across jurisdictions is receiving increased attention. This paper reviews existing literature and discusses experiences in selective federal states to evaluate the economic properties of formula apportionment relative...

This paper assesses whether cross-border M and A decisions exhibit network effects. We estimate exponential random graph models (ERGM) and temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM) to evaluate the determinants of cross-country M and A investments at the sectoral level. The results show...

Macro statistics on foreign direct investment (FDI) are blurred by offshore centers with enormous inward and outward investment positions. This paper uses several new data sources, both macro and micro, to estimate the global FDI network while disentangling real investment and phantom investment...

The rise of global supply chains has had profound effects on individual economies and the global trading system, thereby complicating standard macroeconomic analyses. For many of the new and challenging questions brought about by this phenomenon, such as its impact on the global business cycle...