Tax Competition in an Expanding European Union

This paper empirically examines whether expansion of the EU has increased international tax competition. To do so, we use a market potential weighting scheme to estimate the slope of best responses. We find robust evidence for tax competition. In particular, our estimates suggest that EU membership affects responses with EU members responding more to the tax rates of other members. This lends credence to the above noted concerns.Tax Competition; Foreign Direct Investment; Spatial Econometrics

Headquarter Relocations and International Taxation

This paper examines the extent of international headquarter relocations worldwide. About 6 percent of all multinationals relocated their headquarter to another country in the 1997-2007 period. The paper presents empirical evidence on the role of tax in these relocation decisions. It considers a sample of 140 multinationals that relocated their head- quarters over the past decade and compares them to a control group of 1943 multinationals that have not done so. It is found that the additional tax due in the home country upon repatriation of foreign profits has a positive effect on the probability of relocation. The empirical results suggest that an increase in the repatriation tax by 10 percentage points would raise the share of relocating multinationals by 2.2 percentage points, equivalent to an increase in the number of relocations by more than one third. Furthermore, the introduction of controlled foreign corporation legislation also has a positive effect on the number of relocations

International taxation and productivity effects of M&As

We investigate the effect of international differences in corporate taxation on the realization of productivity gains in M&A deals. We argue that tax differentials distort the efficient allocation of productive factors following an M&A and thus mitigate the resulting productivity improvement. Using firm-level data on inputs and outputs of production as well as on corporate M&As, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in the absolute tax differential between the locations of two merging firms reduces the subsequent total factor productivity gain by 4.5%. This effect is less pronounced when firms can use international profit shifting to attenuate effective differences in taxation. In a complementary analysis, we use an event study design and a fixed effects model to explore the timing of the response of productivity, as well as, labor and capital input to the tax rate differential after the merger separately for the acquirer and the target. We show that our findings are mainly driven by deals with targets residing in locations with a tax advantage with respect to the acquirer. In these transactions, tax differentials reduce the post-merger adjustment in the target firm and inhibit the full realization of productivity gains

Corporate taxation and location of intangible assets : patents vs. trademarks

Numerous empirical studies have analysed the influence of corporate taxation on the location of intangible assets within a company group. However, the previous literature has rather focused on studying the impact of taxation on patent location choices assuming that these assets represent the rest of intangibles as well. This paper complements previous studies by estimating and comparing the tax elasticities of two different types of intangibles – patents and trademarks. We employ data on European and US patent and trademark applications in the period of 1996-2012 and estimate a multinomial logit model that incorporates various observed and unobserved factors of the intangible’s location choice. According to our main findings, trademarks are more sensitive to changes in taxation as compared to patents. This implies that firms use trademarks more eagerly for tax planning purposes than patents

International Taxation and Takeover Premiums in Cross-border M&As

Cross-border M&As can trigger a higher international taxation of the target’s income. Non-resident dividend withholding taxes may be imposed by the target country, while additional corporate income taxation can be imposed by the acquiring country. Our evidence suggests that takeover premiums fully reflect non-resident dividend withholding taxes, while there is some evidence that they reflect corporate income taxation by the acquiring country as well. In contrast, acquiring firm stock market returns around the bid announcement do not appear to reflect either type of taxation. These results are consistent with previous findings that the gains of M&As primarily accrue to target shareholders

The impact of taxes on bilateral royalty flows

In 2013 the OECD introduced its Action Plan on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). One of the major concerns of this Plan is a strategic use of intangible assets as an instrument for profit shifting. The main purpose of this paper is to test whether multinational enterprises use intangibles as an important BEPS channel by empirically analysing the relationship between taxation and bilateral royalty flows. We employ the OECD data on 3,660 country-pairs for the time period of 1990-2012 and apply the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator in a fixed-effects framework. The main results point to a negative impact of taxation on bilateral royalty flows. Moreover, we find that tax differentials, which represent a relative level of taxation in a recipient state compared to other potential royalty recipients, have a significant influence on royalty payments as well. For tax policy considerations, the paper provides various insights to the ongoing work on BEPS by the G20, the OECD, and the European Commission. For example, we find that such reform suggestions of the OECD Action Plan as an enforcement of the Nexus Approach, as well as an introduction of strict Controlled Foreign Company rules and transfer pricing regulations are likely to reduce international royalty flows

Tax Competition in an Expanding European Union

This paper empirically examines whether expansion of the EU has increased international tax competition. To do so, we use a simple model of tax competition to determine how a given country weights the taxes of others when choosing its own tax. This indicates that the market potential of a country (which includes both domestic consumption and exports) is the appropriate weight. This is an improvement on the adhoc and often endogenous weighting schemes used elsewhere. Unlike those studies, we find robust evidence for tax competition. In particular, our estimates suggest that EU membership affects responses with EU members responding more to the tax rates of other members. This lends credence to the above-noted concerns.

Can European banks' country-by-country reports reveal profit shifting? An analysis of the information content of EU banks' disclosures

We create a novel database of hand-collected information from the country-by-country reports (CbCRs) of more than 100 multinational bank groups headquartered in the EU for 2014-2016. We compare this new dataset with information from Orbis and Bank Focus to assess in how far the new disclosure obligation increased transparency on banks’ tax avoidance behavior. Our descriptive analysis shows that CbCRs uncover a large fraction of worldwide profits and real activities in terms of employees of EU bank groups, especially in tax havens. We also document a striking disconnect between reported profits and real activity, noting considerable heterogeneity between different tax havens and bank groups from different headquarter countries. Regression analysis based on CbCR data and Bank Focus data leads us to expect a tax semielasticity of banks’ reported profits of about -4.6. In this regard, CbCRs are indicative of a more pronounced tax sensitivity than conventional databases suggest. However, the lack of important economic variables (total assets and staff cost) impedes an exact estimation of banks’ profit shifting based on CbCR data alone and with standard methods. These insights are especially relevant in the context of the ongoing political discussions whether to introduce a public CbCR for all large multinational firms in the EU

Effects of territorial and worldwide corporation tax systems on outbound M&As

Repatriation taxes reduce the competitiveness of multinational firms from tax credit countries when bidding for targets in low tax countries. This comparative disadvantage with respect to bidders from exemption countries violates ownership neutrality, which results in production inefficiencies due to second-best ownership structures. This paper empirically estimates the magnitude of these effects. The abolishment of repatriation taxes in Japan and in the U.K. in 2009 has increased the number of acquisitions abroad by Japanese and British firms by 31.9% and 3.9 %, respectively. A similar policy switch in the U.S. is simulated to increase the number of U.S. cross-border acquisition by 17.1 %. We estimate the yearly gain in efficiency to be around 525 million dollar due to the Japanese reform and 13.5 million dollar due to the U.K. reform. Simulating such a reform for the U.S. results in a yearly efficiency gain of 1134 million dollar