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...

At procurement auctions, with bid preferences, qualified firms are treated special. A common policy involves scaling the bids of preferred firms by a discount factor for the purposes of evaluation only. Introducing such an asymmetry has three effects: first, preferred firms may inflate their bids, yet still win the auction; second, nonpreferred firms may bid more aggressively than in the absenc...

Multinational companies can shift profit and income between branches in order to reduce the overall tax liabilities of the company. The result is a tax competition between countries. In this paper we consider the sequential choice of tax rates to illustrate the potential effects of tax leadership. We use a profit shifting model with multinational firms that operate in two countries, large and s...

Creating Jobs Through Public Subsidies: An Empirical Analysis This paper analyses the impact of government grants on labour demand using plant level data for manufacturing industry in Ireland. Our data consists of a large sample of plants and their complete grant history. We provide evidence that additional employment is created over and above the level that would have prevailed in the absence ...

Tax incentives offered to attract firms engaged in foreign direct investment are often tied to performance requirements such as domestic content restrictions. The tax competition literature has repeatedly shown that competition between municipalities for mobile firms tends to drive taxes to low levels. One would expect a comparable result for burdensome performance requirements. Despite this, t...

Our aim was to produce a cognitive architecture for modelling some properties of sensorimotor learning in infants, namely the ability to accumulate adaptations and skills over multiple tasks in a manner which allows recombination and re-use of task specific competences. The control architecture we invented consisted of a population of compartments (units of neuroevolution) each containing netwo...

This paper considers the optimal taxation of savings intermediation and payment services in a dynamic general equilibrium setting, when the government can also use consumption and income taxes. When payment services are used in strict proportion to ...nal consumption, and the cost of intermediation services is ...xed and the same across ...rms, the optimal taxes are generally indeterminate. But...

ABSTRACT Although determinants of cross-border merger and acquisitions (M&As) have received substantial attention in the literature, research examining effect tax system characteristics on M&As is more limited. Cross-border implications for both acquiring firm target firm. Because firms evaluate investments based expected after-tax returns, I expect that managers consider potential savi...

Virulent strains of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) serogroups O103 and O121 are considered adulterants in beef. Two high-resolution melting (HRM) real-time PCR assays were standardized for the specific detection discrimination potentially virulent avirulent E. O121. The HRM assay offered possibility to distinguish clearly STEC O103:H2 from O103:H25. two extensively validated usin...