The increasing importance of multinational firms raises the question as to whether and how governments should tax repatriated profits, i.e. affiliate profits returned to the headquarters. The answer to this question is especially relevant for profit repatriations within the European Union where...

Die finanzwissenschaftliche Theorie hat lange Zeit die Auffassung unterstützt, dass ausländische wie inländische Einkommen besteuert werden sollten (Anrechnungsverfahren). Mittlerweile haben viele empirische Studien ergeben, dass es gesamtwirtschaftlich effizienter sei, ausländische...

Forward looking measures like the well-known effective marginal tax rate developed by King and Fullerton (1984) are often criticized for not taking into account the complexity of the tax law. This paper derives a method of evaluating this kind of measure and of quantifying the bias resulting...

A widespread objection to the introduction of consumption tax systems claims that this would lead to high tax revenue losses. This paper investigates the revenue effects of a consumption tax reform in Germany. Our results suggest that the revenue losses would be surprisingly low. We find a...

The standard tax theory result that investment should not be distorted is based on the assumption that profits are locally bound. In this paper we analyze the optimal tax policy when firms are internationally mobile. We show that the optimal policy response to increasing firm mobility may be...

Does the reduction of the effective tax burden on corporations trigger foreign direct investment? We take the German tax reform of 2000 as a natural experiment in order to isolate the impact of corporate taxation on the investment of foreign-held affiliates in Germany. We do so by exploiting the...

In this paper we ask whether recent claims that the US government should switch from the tax credit system to the exemption system are justified. We study corporate taxation in a model where international capital flows are either greenfield investment projects or acquisitions of existing firms,...

This paper studies corporate taxation in a model where foreign investment of firms may affect the profitability of the investor firm's domestic activities. In this framework, corporate taxes distort the quality, not just the quantity of foreign direct investment flows. High-tax countries may see...

In this paper, we analyze tax competition in a model where investor firms have the choice between two types of investment, greenfield investment and mergers and acquisitions. We show that the coexistence of these two types of investment intensifies tax competition in comparison to the case where...

Recent empirical studies find that foreign direct investment (FDI) by a multinational firm is not associated with a reduction of the firm’s domestic activities. As it is often argued, this finding may imply that a country should not tax the firm’s foreign profit income since this reduces...