HARMONIZATION OF THE TAX BASE IN CORPORATE INCOME TAX

How Elastic is the Corporate Income Tax Base?

Effective profit taxation and the elasticity of the corporate income tax base : evidence from German corporate tax return data

We estimate the elasticity of corporate taxable income with respect to the effective corporate tax rate on the basis of a pseudo-panel constructed from corporate tax return micro data for the period 1998-2001, a period which saw the introduction of a major corporate tax reform in Germany. Endogeneity of the effective tax rate is controlled for by an instrumental variable approach. Our instrumen...

Search Costs and Corporate Income Tax Competition

This paper studies corporate tax competition if it is costly to learn some of the elements that determine the e¤ective tax burden. Search cost may, but need not, eliminate the tax competition pressure. The outcome depends on the boundaries of tax rate and tax base choices. Search cost can explain the empirically observed tax cuts cum base broadening. Keywords: Costly search, tax competition, co...

Is Tax Harmonization Useful?

It is a widely acknowledged result of the literature on capital tax competition that underprovision of public goods can only be avoided if tax coordination between governments is intensive and residence-based capital taxation can be enforced. In this paper we use a model where commodity and factor taxes are available and we show that governments competing for tax bases will choose a globally ef...

Income Tax Buyouts and Income Tax Evasion

A tax buyout is a contract between tax authorities and a tax payer which reduces the marginal income tax rate in exchange for a lump-sum payment. While previous contributions have focussed on labour supply, we consider the interaction with tax evasion and show that a buyout can increase expected tax revenues. This will be the case if (1) the audit probability is constant and the penalty for eva...