Mr.Alexander D Klemm

Victor Mylonas

Mr.Philippe Wingender

Ms.Li Liu

This paper assesses a possible explanation for the global downward trend in top personal income tax rates over the last decades: globalization and the related tax evasion and avoidance opportunities could have raised elasticities of taxable income, which would imply lower optimal tax rates. The paper estimates elasticities of taxable income for top income earners using a large sample of economies and years with a common method, allowing an analysis of trends in such elasticities. The paper finds that elasticities do not appear to exhibit any clear pattern over the years. The downward trend in tax rates must have other possible explanations, which are briefly discussed.

Are Elasticities of Taxable Income Rising?

Ruud A. de Mooij

Mr.Michael Keen

Sebastian Beer

Shafik Hebous

Schemes of residual profit allocation (RPA) tax multinationals by allocating their ‘routine’ profits to countries in which their activities take place and sharing their remaining ‘residual’ profit across countries on some formulaic basis. They have recently and rapidly come to prominence in policy discussions, yet almost nothing is known about their impact on revenue, investment and efficiency. This paper explores these issues, conceptually and empirically. It finds residual profits to be substantial, but concentrated in a relatively few MNEs, headquartered in few countries. The impact on tax revenue of reallocating excess profits under RPA, while adverse for investment hubs, appears beneficial for lower income countries even when the formula allocates by destination-based sales. The impact on investment incentives is ambiguous and specific both to countries and MNE groups; only if the rate of tax on routine profits is low does aggregate efficiency seem likely to increase.

Exploring Residual Profit Allocation

In 2009, the United Kingdom changed from a worldwide to a territorial tax system, abolishing dividend taxes on foreign repatriation from many low-tax countries. This paper assesses the causal effect of territorial taxation on real investments, using a unique dataset for multinational affiliates in 27 European countries and employing the difference-in-difference approach. It finds that the territorial reform has increased the investment rate of UK multinationals by 15.7 percentage points in low-tax countries. In the absence of any significant investment reduction elsewhere, the findings represent a likely increase in total outbound investment by UK multinationals.

Ms.Li Liu

About

Books

Join the club