Do corporate inversions cost the US Treasury billions of dollars in tax revenue, justifying legislative responses and even strong-arming corporations from moving their tax domicile abroad? We show that corporate inversions not only do not appear to reduce, but, paradoxically, are even likely to increase tax collections by the US Treasury. JEL classification: M40, G34, H25, F23

We show in a two-period world with endogenous savings and two assets, one of them exhibiting a stochastic return that an interest adjusted income tax is optimal. This tax leaves a safe component of interest income tax free and taxes the excess return with a special tax rate. There is no trade off between risk allocation and efficiency in intertemporal consumption. Both goals are reached. As the...

The purpose of this paper is to use a game theoretical approach to analyze tax harmonization, or competition, in a monetary union, more specifically in Europe. Without harmonization, free-riding behaviors may appear, leading to a sub-optimal tax equilibrium. Tax competition may also create budgetary problems and the objective of a balanced budget may not be attained. But national tax autonomy h...

An important puzzle in corporate taxation is that effective tax rates have fallen significantly while tax revenue has simultaneously risen in most countries. Moreover, the gross profitability of firms seems to be lower in high-tax countries, even though standard models of international investment would yield the opposite conclusion. We offer an explanation for these stylized facts by setting up...

The paper compares non-cooperative commodity taxation under the destination and origin principles under a variety of different assumptions about market structure. We consider a model of international duopoly with either quantity or price competition of firms and either segmented or integrated markets, and a monopolistic competition model with mobile firms. In each setting the international spil...

Thin capitalization rules have become an important element in the corporate tax systems of developed countries. This paper sets up a model where national and multinational firms choose tax-efficient financial structures and countries compete for multinational firms through statutory tax rates and thin capitalization rules that limit the tax-deductibility of internal debt flows. In a symmetric t...

The economic effects of environmental taxes depend on the market structure. Under imperfect competition with free entry and exit, environmental taxes have an impact on economies of scale by changing the number and size of firms. Whether economies of scale rise or fall in a particular industry depends on induced changes in the price elasticity of demand. Because export demand is more price elast...

The Canadian federal tax reform of 1988 replaced a spousal tax exemption with a non-refundable tax credit. This reduced the “jointness” of the tax system: after the reform, secondary earners’ effective “first dollar” marginal tax rates no longer depended on the marginal tax rates of their spouses. In practice, the effective “first dollar” marginal tax rates faced by women with high income husba...

We present an experimental study on the wasted resources associated with tax evasion. This waste arises from taxpayers and tax authorities, investing costly effort in concealment, respectively detection, of tax evasion. We show that (socially inefficient) efforts depend positively on the prevailing tax rate, but not on the fine which is imposed in case of detected tax evasion. The frequency of ...