International Tax Avoidance and U.S. International Trade

Technology, International Trade, and Pollution from US Manufacturing

Pollution emitted by US manufacturers has been declining steadily over the past several decades, while at the same time, the real value of manufacturing output has been increasing. This cleanup has two sources: advances in production or abatement processes (“technology”), and changes in the composition of goods manufactured in the United States. The composition changes can be divided further in...

Evaluating International Tax Reform

This paper introduces “capital ownership neutrality” (CON) and “national ownership neutrality” (NON) as benchmarks for evaluating the desirability of international tax reforms, and applies them to analyze recent U.S. tax reform proposals. Tax systems satisfy CON if they do not distort the ownership of capital assets, which promotes global efficiency whenever the productivity of an investment di...

Reconsidering International Tax Neutrality

International Tax Competition and Coordination

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the theory of international tax competition. Starting with the standard framework, it visits the non-cooperative equilibrium of tax competition, analyses aspects of partial and regional coordination, repeated interaction, stock-flow-effects, agglomeration effects and time consistency issues in dynamic models. We discuss profit shifting in the...

Liquidity and International Trade

This paper introduces a framework to study the links between the supply of liquid assets for the financial market and the international allocation of economic activity. Private assets’ liquidity properties—their usefulness as collateral or media of exchange in financial transactions— affect assets’ values and interest rates, with consequences on firm entry, production, aggregate productivity, a...