This paper models a capital-exporting country that encounters difficulties in taxing foreignsource income, due to tax evasion problems. The paper compares the country’s optimal effective tax rates on the income from capital invested at home and abroad (including penalties levied on detected tax evaders). It finds that tax evasion abroad does not provide a justification for a relatively low effe...

When multinational firms expand their operations in tax havens, do they divert activity from non-havens? Much of the debate on tax competition presumes that the answer to this question is yes. This paper offers a model for examining the relationship between activity in havens and non-havens, and discusses the implications of recent evidence in light of that model. Properly interpreted, the evid...

This paper tries to explain the declining level of public investment in OECD countries. The theoretical framework hints to the relevance of a number of demand and supply factors – ranging from the yield of public investment to institutions like the EU deficit limits. The econometric results indicate that the decline is largely due to two developments: First to the pile-up of public debt since t...

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...

This paper studies incentives to develop advanced pollution abatement technology when technology may spillover across agents and pollution abatement is a public good. We are motivated by a variety of pollution control issues where solutions require the development and implementation of new pollution abatement technologies. We show that at the Nash equilibrium of a simultaneous-move game with R&...

As the world recovers from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the international community should promote a mix of policies to sustain this global recovery and create jobs through reducing carbon dependency, ecological degradation and poverty. Such a Global Green New Deal (GGND) requires a long-term commitment to implementing and coordinating “green investments” by the Group o...

This paper examines the implications of tax evasion for "scal competition and tax harmonization policies in an economic union. First, for symmetric countries, it proves that the equilibrium values of the tax and audit rates are less than optimal. Tax harmonization alone will also lead to a less than optimal audit rate. Second, for asymmetric countries, the paper shows that integration may turn ...

We study fiscal spending by supranational unions, where participation is voluntary and countries bargain over contributions to and the allocation of a central budget. We establish and explore the link between the budget’s allocation and nations’ contributions that occurs since bargaining power is endogenous, and a country’s outside option during budget negotiations is to withdraw its contributi...

European Asylum Policy Policy towards asylum seekers has been a controversial topic for more than a decade. Rising numbers of asylum applications have been met with ever-tougher policies to deter them. Following a period of policy harmonisation, the EU has reached a crucial stage in the development of a new Common European Asylum System. This paper seeks to shed light on what form this should t...

A recent empirical literature has arisen documenting the response of one nation’s policy choices, including tax, environmental, and labour policies, to those of others. This has been largely interpreted as evidence of competition, be it for mobile resources (like FDI, taxable book income, etc.) or yardstick. We present a third explanation based on learning. When countries’ tax choices reflect p...