This paper offers an extensive survey and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the driving factors of R&D. These factors are subsumed under five broad types. The paper first summarises the key predictions from theory regarding each type's R&D effect. It then examines for which...

Important determinants of multinational firms’ choice of location include, besides resource cost and infrastructure, the taxation regime through its effects on international pricing and profits. This paper investigates the effects of tax rates on firms’ profits and financing decisions by...

Migration of young workers (as distinct from retirees), even when driven in by the generosity of the welfare state, slows down the trend of increasing dependency ratio. But, even though low-skill migration improves the dependency ratio, it nevertheless burdens the welfare state. Recent studies...

In the absence of distortionary tax and spending policies, freer immigration and trade for a country would often be supported by similar groups thanks to similar impacts on labor income. But government policies that redistribute income may alter the distributional politics. In particular,...

This paper models strategic taxation policy of home and host governments when a multinational enterprise sets transfer prices on globally-joint inputs such as research and development. Tax credit and deduction allowances, as well as no taxation of foreign-earned profits, result in identical...

The process of globalization, which is ongoing in a variety of dimensions, the ever-increasing mobility of capital and production factors as well as the fiscal problems in many European countries make the debate over tax competition still relevant today. The article discusses the problem of tax...

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of fiscal cooperation on local taxation in a decentralized country, using the French experience in urban municipalities. We estimate a model of tax setting for local business tax using spatial and dynamic econometric techniques, for the...

Interjurisdictional competition over mobile tax bases is an easily understood mechanism, but actual tax-base elasticities are difficult to estimate. Political pressure for reducing tax rates could therefore be based on erroneous estimates of the mobility of tax bases. We show that tax...

Building on recent contributions to the New Economic Geography literature, this paper analyses the relation between asymmetric market size, trade integration and business income tax differentials across countries. First, relying on Ottaviano and Van Ypersele's (2005) foot-loose capital model of...

We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a 'second- mover advantage.' In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental- standard levels. We introduce this feature to...