Increased activity of multinational firms exposes national corporate tax bases to cross-country profit shifting, but also leads to rising profitability of the corporate sector. We incorporate these two effects of economic integration into a simple political economy model where the median voter...

This paper surveys tax haven legislation and links the literature on tax havens to the literature on asymmetric information. I argue that the core aim of tax haven legislation is to create private information (secrecy) for the users of tax havens. This leads to moral hazard and transaction costs...

This paper surveys tax haven legislation and links the literature on tax havens to the literature on asymmetric information. I argue that the core aim of tax haven legislation is to create private information (secrecy) for the users of tax havens. This leads to moral hazard and transaction costs...

Multinational companies can exploit the tax advantage of debt more aggressively than national companies by shifting debt from affiliates in low tax countries to affiliates in high tax countries. Previous papers have either omitted internal debt or external debt from the analysis. We are the...

Previous theoretical studies on the debt shifting behavior of multinationals have assumed affiliates of multinationals to be wholly owned. We develop a model that allows a multinational firm to determine both the leverage and ownership structure in affiliates endogenously. A main finding is that...

We examine the capital structures of multinational companies. Multinational companies can exploit the tax advantage of debt more aggressively than national companies by shifting debt from affiliates in low-tax countries to affiliates in high-tax countries. Previous papers have omitted either...

There is a growing concern that governments lose substantial corporate tax revenue because of profit shifting through transfer-pricing and thin-capitalization strategies. Existing literature studies profit shifting and transfer pricing separately. In practice, the choice of debt-to-asset ratios...

There is a growing concern that governments lose substantial corporate tax revenue due to transfer pricing and debt shifting strategies. Existing literature studies debt shifting and transfer pricing separately. In practice, however, the choice of debt-to-asset ratios in affiliates and the...

Previous theoretical studies on the debt shifting behavior of multinationals have assumed affiliates of multinationals to be wholly owned. We develop a model that allows a multinational firm to determine both the leverage and ownership structure in affiliates endogenously. A main finding is that...

Multinational companies can exploit the tax advantage of debt more aggressively than national companies. Besides utilizing the standard debt tax shield, multinationals can shift debt from affiliates in low-tax countries to affiliates in high-tax countries. We study the capital structure of...