It is often claimed that multinational firms avoid taxes by shifting income from high-tax to low-tax countries. Using a five year panel of data for two hundred large U.S. manufacturing firms, we find that U.S. tax liability, as a fraction either of U.S. sales or U.S. assets, is related to the...

Since the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, foreign direct investment (FDI) both into and from the United States has surged. Inward FDI reached an all-time high of $58.4 billion in 1988, continuing a secular increase that began in the late 1970's. Outward FDI also reached an all-time high...

This paper investigates how the tax system of the U.S. and the capital-exporting country combine to affect the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the U.S. First, using aggregate data, it corroborates earlier work suggesting that the U.S. effective tax rate does influence the amount of...

This paper presents a life-cycle simulation analysis of the interaction among savings decisions, housing purchase decisions, and the tax system in the United States and Japan. To investigate this issue, we first document the stylized fact that the typical Japanese household purchases a house...