This paper looks at a country's central government optimal policy in a setting where its two identical local regions compete for the attraction of footloose multinationals to their sites, and where the considered multinationals strictly prefer this country to the rest of the world. For the sake...

We model how multinationals structure their borrowing and lending transactions and find that affiliates in high-tax countries have higher internal and overall debt ratios and lower rental rates of physical capital than comparable domestic firms. We also show that affiliates with minority owners...

This paper models tax competition for mobile firms that are differentiated by the amount of labor needed to cover fixed costs. Because tax competition affects the distribution of firms, it affects both relative equilibrium wages across countries and equilibrium prices. These in turn influence...

This paper analyzes policy competition for a foreign-owned monopolist firm between two asymmetric countries. In particular, one country has a larger economy than the other country does. At the same time, the small country produces an intermediate good for the final good production, while the...

This paper looks into the investment behavior of multinational firms with respect to their locked-out foreign earnings. The focus is on multinational firms subject to credit and deferral home-country taxation such as that of the United States. “Locked-out earnings” refers to the earnings of...

The goals of transfer pricing are to assign a monetary value to a transfer and to minimize the taxes paid by a company as whole. However, because a single company can now have operations literally around the world, transfer pricing has become a very complicated, costly, and lucrative business...

Tax treaties are often viewed as a mechanism for eliminating tax competition, however this approach ignores the need for bargaining over the treaty's terms. This paper focuses on how bargaining can affect the withholding taxes set under the treaty. In a simple framework, we develop hypotheses...

The OECD agreement in principle on a global minimum corporate income tax – Pillar II of the BEPS project – is a major step in international tax regulation and coordination. Yet, its consequences for foreign direct investment (FDI) have received limited attention thus far. The theme chapter...

Cederwall discusses the Tax Foundation's virtual colloquium, "Making Sense of Profit Shifting" — featuring 18 leading tax scholars, practitioners, and policy experts — and explains how it reveals six significant themes of incongruence in the understanding of profit shifting. Cederwall...

What do models of optimal taxation imply about how multinationals should be taxed? Rather than focusing on a variety of neutrality conditions that have been proposed in the literature, this paper goes back to first principles and considers the overall role of the corporate tax. In doing so, the...