As VAT becomes an increasingly important source of tax revenue world-wide, tax policy makers should be well aware of its strengths and weaknesses. In academia, there is strong consensus that tax exemptions rank among the most problematic features of VAT. The very concept of exemption is already...

Taxation inevitably gives rise to tax planning. In the era of globalization, multinationals in particular may not only try to exploit options, inconsistencies and gaps in domestic tax legislation, but they will also (re-)organize their business so as to make an optimal use of international tax...

Deutschland befindet sich inmitten einer intensiven Debatte über die Unternehmensbesteuerung, deren treibende Kraft der internationale Steuerwettbewerb ist. Sind die Unternehmenssteuern in Deutschland tatsächlich zu hoch? Wie sollte eine Reform der Unternehmensbesteuerung ausgestaltet sein?

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Advance pricing agreements (APAs) determine transfer prices for intra-firm transactions in advance. This paper interprets these contracts as a means to overcome a hold-up problem that occurs because governments cannot commit to non-excessive future tax rates. In addition, with private...