To combat firms exploiting transfer pricing as a tool for tax avoidance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) introduced the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Action 13 (BEPS 13), enhancing tax transparency and the exchange of information with tax authorities....

We provide estimates of profit shifting for over 2 million firm-year observations in 100 countries over the period 2009-2020. Employing nonparametric estimation techniques within a mainstay model of profit shifting, we examine how the profits of both parent and subsidiary firms within a...

This paper characterizes profit shifting behavior across the size distribution of multinational enterprises (MNEs) to evaluate the targeting of the recently introduced Global Minimum Tax (GMT). Using German microeconomic administrative data with no reporting gaps for tax havens, we first...

Aggressive profit shifting by multinational enterprises (MNEs) is a growing concern for domestic resource mobilization in developing economies. This paper evaluates the revenue and welfare consequences of a flagship tax avoidance rule that has been implemented in more than 45 countries to...

We develop a methodology to decompose the tax revenue impact of the global minimum tax introduced in 2024 into several components and quantify its potential impact on profit shifting. We apply it to 34 thousand multinational-country observations from tax returns, financial statements and...

Many multinational firms (MNEs) pay low or no corporation tax in high-tax countries because they shift taxable income to tax havens. We incorporate nonconvex costs of profit shifting and unobserved heterogeneity in profit-shifting ability in the MNEs’ value maximization problem to study...

Since 2016, Country-by-Country reporting has provided tax authorities with detailed information about multinationals’ worldwide activities. It has been hailed as a game-changer for corporate taxation, enabling tax authorities to target multinational firms with high profits in tax havens. We...

Taxation of cross-border services has been identified as a high priority issue in the United Nations (UN) negotiations to establish a new global framework for tax. This paper analyses the defects of international tax rules as applied to services, and their exploitation by multinational...

We demonstrate how the incentives of firms that partially own their suppliers or customers to foreclose rivals depend on how the partial owner can extract profits from the target. Compared to a fully vertically integrated firm, a partial owner may obtain only a share of the target's profit but...

This chapter reviews the literature providing empirical estimates on the tax elasticity of multinational profits and discusses the challenges faced when attempting to quantify tax-motivated profit shifting. We first use micro-level data to show that multinational corporations hold a...

Companies often favor debt financing over equity financing due to its tax benefits, allowing multinational companies to exploit internal debt to transfer profits to jurisdictions with lower tax rates. Although the BEPS Action Plan provides governments with guidelines to curb interest deductions...

The Global Minimum Tax (GMT) is applied only to firms above a certain size threshold, permitting countries to set differential tax rates for small and large firms. We analyse tax competition between a tax haven and a non-haven country for heterogeneous multinationals to evaluate the effects of...

The goal of this research is to investigate whether taxation affects the leverage decisions of banks and if the response of leverage to tax increases depends on profit-shifting opportunities available to individual banks. This topic remains controversial since it is often believed that banking...

Multinational enterprises are increasingly using offshore locations to pay lower taxes on their profits. This behavior has distortive effects on the global economy, as the concentration of multinational activities mirrors global tax patterns. In this paper, I exploit the OECD country-by-country...

We use newly linked tax records to show that the large responses of UK company owner-managers to personal taxes are due to intertemporal income shifting and not to reductions in real business activity. Around half of this shifting is short-term and helps prevent volatile incomes being taxed more...

This study examines whether multinational corporations (MNCs) reclassify related-party payments to avoid the new base erosion and anti-abuse tax (BEAT). The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017 included the BEAT to combat income shifting from the U.S. to foreign entities. An exclusion in the tax law...

This study develops theory and discusses implications of inflexibility in tax-motivated income shifting. We show that inflexibility to adjust income-shifting strategies within a tax year in response to losses implies that income-shifting incentives are based on the expected rather than the...

We investigate multinational firms' activities in tax havens and regulatory efforts to curb these activities in three steps. First, we discuss the evolution of information exchange and disclosure regimes among tax authorities, with a focus on the recent Countryby-Country (CbC) reporting regimes,...

In this paper, we study another approach to the profit shifting costs function of multinational profit shifting. First, we describe the modelling approaches of such costs functions and provide a synthesized analysis. More precisely, we investigate the involved resource costs that multinational...

We exploit the 2017 US tax reform to learn about the tax-competitiveness of US multinational corporations (MNCs) relative to their international peers. Matching on the propensity score, we compare pairs of similar US and European firms listed on the S&P500 or StoxxEurope600 in a...