Relying on a large foreign direct investment (FDI) transaction level dataset, unique both in terms of disaggregation and time and country coverage, this paper examines patterns in greenfield (GF) versus merger & acquisition (MA) investment. Although both are found to seek out large markets with...

The Everything But Arms agreement, introduced by the EU in 2001, eliminated duties on most imports from the least developed countries. To avail of these benefits, however, the exported product must contain a sufficiently large share of local content. Thus, the agreement may have affected both...

Export processing zones (EPZs) are an increasingly common type of special economic zone. They are designed to facilitate international trade by lowering trade costs, such as import duties and/or export taxes. EPZs should thus be particularly attractive locations for multinational enterprises...

An increasing number of international agreements require "nondiscrimination" from their participants, i.e. the government of one country cannot treat foreign firms differently from domestic firms. This is at odds with a government's desire to benefit its own citizens rather than foreign...

The common consolidated corporate tax base has been suggested as a way to curb tax avoidance by allocating profits across borders via a formula. This paper demonstrates that when transfer pricing occurs both for tariff and tax minimization, that moving from separate accounting to formula...

Since its conception, some within the European Union have expressed concerns over the ability of multinationals to avoid taxation by undertaking transfer pricing to shift profits towards low tax locations. These concerns have been growing, leading to a renewed call for a common consolidated...

On April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced a wide-ranging set of "reciprocal tariffs" against many of its trading partners. The calculation of these tariffs have elicited a largely negative reaction in part due to the simple formula used to calculate them. In this note, I provide a model...

Increasing attention has been given to the fact that some multinational enterprises shift income to tax haven countries, an activity that generates inequality in corporate taxation. Here, we examine how profit shifting relates to wage inequality. Using rich matched employer-employee data from...

It is common to summarize the impact of tax havens as a shift of tax revenues from high to low-tax jurisdictions. This chapter discusses the economic impact of tax havens that goes beyond a zero-sum transfer of the tax base, what we label real effects. We review the literature and focus on...

This paper describes the construction of the Knowledge Input-Output (KIO) table constructed as part of the RETHINK project. Using PATSTAT data on forty years of patent data from across the globae, the KIO table provides information on the number of patent applications across ten major patenting...