Johannes Becker

University of Münster | WWU · Department of Economics

We report evidence from a series of laboratory experiments that focus on mental accounting of ‘public funds’. Groups of three players decide upon how much to redistribute within the group. We measure the preference to redistribute when transfers are made either out of individual accounts (the players’ own money) or out of a common account (the grou...

We analyze the unilateral introduction of a destination-based corporate cash-flow tax system (DBT), as proposed by Auerbach and Devereux (AEJ Policy 2018). We show that, first, the DBT rate is decision-neutral only if the source tax country makes the DBT payments deductible from its tax base. Second, a unilateral DBT introduction is, in many aspect...

This paper provides the first theoretical and empirical analysis of how taxation shapes the joint allocation of risk and profits inside the multinational firm. Theoretically, we identify three mechanisms through which corporate taxes may shape the within-firm allocation of risk: (1) transfer pricing rules requiring risk to be compensated with highe...

Auf internationaler Ebene wird aktuell über ein System effektiver internationaler Mindeststeuern auf die Gewinne multinationaler Unternehmen verhandelt, das bis Ende 2020 beschlossen werden soll. Eine Mindeststeuer könnte die Effizienz und Effektivität der internationalen Besteuerung deutlich steigern und den Steuerwettbewerb abmildern. Sie stellt...

According to the OECD and the EU Commission, profits should be taxed 'where value is created'. A commonly accepted definition of the term 'value creation' is so far lacking, however. This article offers a pragmatic and contextualized analysis of the new 'value creation' paradigm and examines its implications for international tax policy in the era...

Unternehmen der digitalen Wirtschaft wie Google, Facebook, Amazon usw. sind in Europa allgegenwärtig, zahlen aber nur wenig Steuern. Die Finanzminister einiger wichtiger EU-Mitgliedstaaten haben deshalb eine umsatzbasierte Ausgleichsteuer auf Internetunternehmen vorgeschlagen. Ein solches Steuerinstrument verletzt jedoch wesentliche Regeln des inte...

This paper considers optimal fiscal equalisation in a federation that competes with other federations for business tax base. It formalises the argument that, under certain circumstances, federations have an incentive to foster tax competition among their subunits in order to attract tax base from other federations. We show that optimal fiscal equal...

Die neue US-Regierung plant eine radikale Unternehmensteuerreform. Sie zielt auf eine cashflow-basierte Besteuerung nach dem Bestimmungslandprinzip, wie es in Europa für die Mehrwertsteuer gilt. Die Autoren sind der Auffassung, dass die unilaterale Einführung einer solchen Steuer die Handelspartner der USA, vor allem die EU, vor große Herausforderu...

Advance pricing agreements (APAs) determine transfer prices for intra-firm transactions in advance of tax filing. This paper presents a model in which these contracts serve to overcome a hold-up problem that occurs because governments cannot commit to non-excessive future tax rates. We find that implemented APAs lead to a Pareto improvement even wh...

Although policy-makers often promise to reduce budget deficits, most countries have high and increasing debt ratios. In this regard, government behaviour shows some intriguing similarities to individuals with self-control problems. If this comparison holds, there is a range of policy measures which could be taken by governments willing to reduce th...

We analyze the role of business taxation for corporate risk-taking under different accounting principles (such as mark-to-market, lower-of-cost-or-market and historical cost). We demonstrate that conservative accounting may imply incentives to overinvest in risky assets. However, with imperfect loss offsets, the mark-to-market principle penalizes r...

In den meisten nationalen Steuersystemen wird die Fremdkapitalfinanzierung gegenüber der Eigenkapitalfinanzierung begünstigt. Aus ökonomischer Sicht wirft diese Beobachtung zum einen die Frage auf, welche Folgen die steuerliche Ungleichbehandlung für das Finanzierungsverhalten von Unternehmen hat. Das Kapitel gibt hierzu einen Überblick über empiri...

An increase in the taxation of foreign affiliates reduces domestic investment, as has recently been empirically shown in Becker and Riedel (2012). This paper investigates the implication of this finding for tax competition. It is shown that an increase in the number of multinational firms (in contrast to purely national firms) may actually mitigate...

Recent empirical studies find that foreign direct investment (FDI) by a multinational firm is not associated with a reduction of the firm’s domestic activities. As it is often argued, this finding may imply that a country should not tax the firm’s foreign profit income since this reduces foreign investment without benefitting the domestic economy....

We analyze the optimal tax choices of a revenue-maximizing government that levies taxes from firms of which the true degree of mobility is ex ante unknown. Differential tax treatment of immobile and mobile firms is ruled out, but the government may learn from the firms’ location responses to past tax rate changes. Firms, however, may anticipate thi...

This note provides a novel argument why countries may have incentives to allow for some profit shifting to low-tax jurisdictions. The reason is that a tightening of transfer pricing policies by high tax countries leads to more agressive tax rate competition by low tax countries.

If a firm operates abroad, the host and the residence country have to decide how to divide the taxing rights among them. Firstly, the host country has to determine whether or not the firm has to file for income taxation at source. Secondly, the income has to be split between the two jurisdictions for tax purposes. These two decisions determine the...

: This paper reviews theoretical predictions on the likely effect of globalization on tax revenues and tax structures in developed countries. The predictions are then confronted with data from OECD countries. The evidence suggests that, in contrast to wide-held views, globalization only marginally affects tax revenues and structures. Most important...

Forward looking measures like the well-known e¤ective marginal tax rate developed by King and Fullerton (1984) are often criticized for not taking into account the complexity of the tax law. This paper derives a method of evaluating this kind of measure and of quantifying the bias resulting from simplifying assumptions, especially on the pattern of...

Zusammenfassung Die finanzwissenschaftliche Theorie hat lange Zeit die Auffassung unterstützt, dass ausländische wie inländische Einkommen besteuert werden sollten (Anrechnungsverfahren). Mittlerweile haben viele empirische Studien ergeben, dass es gesamtwirtschaftlich effizienter sei, ausländische Einkommen von der Steuer freizustellen. Für beide...

The increasing importance of multinational firms raises the question as to whether and how governments should tax repatriated profits, i.e. affiliate profits returned to the headquarters. The answer to this question is especially relevant for profit repatriations within the European Union where multinational firm investment is substantial and tax c...

We introduce transport cost of trade in products into the classical Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) model of capital tax competition. It turns out that even small levels of transport cost lead to a complete breakdown of the seminal result, the underprovision of public goods. Instead, there is a symmetric equilibrium with efficient public goods provis...

If conventional instruments of strategic trade policy are unavailable, the system of foreign profit taxation and transfer price guidelines may serve as surrogate policy instruments. In this paper, I consider a model where firms from two countries compete with each other on a third market. I analyze optimal policy choices of the firms' residence cou...

The response of business capital to user costs is central to economic evaluations of tax and monetary policies. Despite intensive research effort though, no consensus about the size of this elasticity has been achieved. The divergence in prior estimates may arise because previous studies have neglected cointegration among capital, its user costs, a...

The ongoing internationalization of business activity fuels concerns that governments may lose their ability to tax business income. By using data on sixteen German states from 1970 to 2005, we estimate the impact of internationalization, measured by trade volumes and stocks of foreign direct investment, on business tax revenues. We control for the...

The European Union (EU) provides coordination and financing of trans-European transport infrastructures, i.e. roads and railways, which link the EU member states and reduce the cost of transport and mobility. This raises the question of whether EU involvement in this area is justified by inefficiencies of national infrastructure policies. Moreover,...

This paper measures the relative importance of quality and quantity effects of corporate taxation on foreign direct investment. Quantity is affected if corporate taxes reduce the equilibrium stock of foreign capital in a given country. Quality effects arise if taxes decrease the extent to which investment contributes to the corporate tax base and t...

Would the introduction of a corporate tax system with consolidated tax base and formula apportionment lead to socially wasteful mergers and acquisitions across borders? This paper analyzes a two-country model with an international investor considering acquisitions of already existing target firms in a high-tax country and a low-tax country. The inv...

This paper analyses tax competition and tax coordination in a model where capital flows occur in the form of mergers and acquisitions, rather than greenfield investment. In this framework, we show that differences in residence based taxes do not necessarily distort international ownership patterns. Moreover, tax competition yields globally efficien...

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag werden anhand eines einfachen Modells des Steuerwettbewerbs aktuelle empirische Studien zu Steuerwirkungen auf unternehmerische Entscheidungen diskutiert. Insbesondere die Rolle multinationaler Unternehmen steht dabei im Fokus der Untersuchung, sowie die Frage, ob und inwiefern multinationale Unternehmen den Steuer...

This paper considers theory-based expectations on the evolution of tax structures in developed countries and confronts them with stylised facts from aggregate tax revenue data. A bilateral similarity index is introduced which allows the measurement of the similarity of tax systems conditional on country characteristics. A slow but steady convergenc...

Several recent papers show that increases in the capital stock at one multinational affiliate tend to raise the capital stock at other locations, rather than to reduce it. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically explore the consequences of these findings for national corporate tax policy. Our main hypothesis is that domestic corporate taxat...

In this paper, we analyze tax competition in a model where investor firms have the choice between two types of investment, greenfield investment and mergers and acquisitions. We show that the coexistence of these two types of investment intensifies tax competition in comparison to the case where there is only greenfield investment. If a specific ta...

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. In our framework, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The main hypothesis is that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of...

The impact of a stronger work requirement for welfare recipients in a workfare program is studied in an efficiency wage model where a representative firm chooses its level of monitoring activities. A stricter workfare policy raises employment as well as the monitoring intensity. It typically increases profits and reduces the tax rate. The impact on...

The paper presents the characteristic features of a pure dual income tax, discusses the current DIT system in the Nordic countries, which after recent reforms differs from the traditional DIT system implemented in the 1990s and describes the Cnossen agenda, which calls for the introduction of a dual income tax (DIT) as a first step towards a Europe...

In this paper, we consider optimal tax enforcement policy in the presence of profit shifting towards tax havens. We show that, under separate accounting, tax enforcement levels may be too high due to negative fiscal externalities. In contrast, under formula apportionment, tax enforcement is likely to be too low due to positive externalities of tax...

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians´ outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable implication stating that the amount of time spent on out...

Die Reform der Unternehmensbesteuerung verfolgt das Ziel, mehr Investitionen und Arbeitsplätze in Deutschland zu halten und die Verlagerung von Buchgewinnen in Niedrigsteuerländer einzuschränken. Gleichzeitig sollen die Steueraufkommensverluste möglichst gering gehalten werden. Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die wichtigsten Elemente der R...

In this paper we ask whether recent claims that the US government should switch from the tax credit system to the exemption system are justified. We study corporate taxation in a model where international capital flows are either greenfield investment projects or acquisitions of existing firms, and where investment is motivated by either cost reduc...

This paper studies corporate taxation in a model where foreign investment of firms may affect the profitability of the investor firm’s domestic activities. In this framework, corporate taxes distort the quality, not just the quantity of foreign direct investment flows. High-tax countries may see their tax revenues decrease in response to inbound fo...

In this study, we estimate the impacts of differences in international tax rates on the probability of choosing a location for an affiliate of a multinational firm. In particular, we distinguish between the tax sensitivity of Greenfield and M&A investments. Based on a novel firm-level dataset on German outbound FDI, we find evidence that location d...

Forward-looking measures like the well-known effective marginal tax rate developed by King and Fullerton (1984) rely strongly on standardized assumptions on the effective use of depreciation deductions. This paper derives a method of assessing these assumptions empirically and of quantifying the bias resulting from simplifiying assumptions. Using a...

The debate about Germany as a high or low tax country is nourished by the fact that different concepts of measuring the effective tax burden of company profits arrive at contradictory results. Depending on the indicator used, the tax burden of firms is high or low in international comparison. We discuss the reasons for differences in results and pr...

Does the reduction of the effective tax burden on corporations trigger foreign direct investment? We take the German tax reform of 2000 as a natural experiment in order to isolate the impact of corporate taxation on the investment of foreign-held affiliates in Germany. We do so by exploiting the very rich MiDi data base from the Deutsche Bundesbank...

Deutschland leidet unter hoher Arbeitslosigkeit und einer akuten Wachstumsund Investitionsschwäche. Weil Investitionen hauptsächlich von Unternehmen getätigt werden und die Entscheidung über eine Erhöhung der Arbeitsnachfrage in Unternehmen fällt, liegt es nahe, sich die Rahmenbedingungen für Unternehmen genauer anzusehen, um den Ursachen der Krise...

Die Mehrwertsteuererhöhung und mögliche Belastungen der Bürger durch die Steuerfinanzierung von Sozialleistungen haben eine Diskussion über die Höhe der Steuerquote entfacht. Gibt es eine optimale Steuerquote? Welche Anforderungen werden an den Staat gestellt? Wie ist die deutsche Steuerquote im internationalen Vergleich zu beurteilen und wie hat si...

Kapitalmarktorientierte Unternehmen in Deutschland orientieren sich in zunehmendem Maße an der Konzernsteuerquote. Diese unterscheidet sich in wesentlichen Aspekten von den in der Forschung gängigen Maßen der e¤ektiven Besteuerung, die auf dem neoklassischen Investitionsmodell basieren. Dies wirft die Frage auf, ob und wie sich das Investitionsverh...

The standard tax theory result that investment should not be distorted is based on the assumption that profits are locally bound. In this paper we analyze the optimal tax policy when firms are internationally mobile. We show that the optimal policy response to increasing firm mobility may be taxation, subsidization or non-distortion of investment d...

A widespread objection to the introduction of consumption tax systems claims that this would lead to high tax revenue losses. This paper investigates the revenue effects of a consumption tax reform in Germany. Our results suggest that the revenue losses would be surprisingly low. We find a maximum revenue loss of 1.6 per cent of annual GDP. In some...

Das bestehende Steuersystem wird häufig als ein Grund für die anhaltende Investitions- und Wachstumsschwäche in Deutschland angesehen. Daher wird insbesondere von Seiten deutscher Wirtschaftswissenschaftler eine konsumorientierte Umgestaltung des Steuersystems gefordert. Hingegen weisen Kritiker dieser Ansicht darauf hin, dass dies auf Unternehmens...

Deutschland befindet sich inmitten einer intensiven Debatte über die Unternehmensbesteuerung, deren treibende Kraft der internationale Steuerwettbewerb ist. Sind die Unternehmenssteuern in Deutschland tatsächlich zu hoch? Wie sollte eine Reform der Unternehmensbesteuerung ausgestaltet sein? --

The asymptotic distributions of cointegration tests are approximated using the Gamma distribution. The tests considered are for the I(1), the conditional I(1), as well as the I(2) model. Formulae for the parameters of the Gamma distributions are derived from response surfaces. The resulting approximation is flexible, easy to implement and more accu...

Forward looking measures like the well-known effective marginal tax rate developed by King and Fullerton (1984) are often criticized for not taking into account the complexity of the tax law. This paper derives a method of evaluating this kind of measure and of quantifying the bias resulting from simplifying assumptions, especially on the pattern o...

Die Last der Unternehmensbesteuerung wird in Deutschland häufig als ein wichtiger Grund für die Wachstumsschwäche der letzten Jahre angeführt. Wie hoch ist die effektive steuerliche Belastung von Investitionen in der Bundesrepublik? Wie kann sie gemessen werden? --

Recent studies by Desai et al. (2005) and Egger and Pfaffermayer (2003) have shown that increased foreign activity of multinational entities raises the MNE's home country investments. Hence, investment levels within a multinational firm tend to be characterized by a complementary relation. In the spirit of these papers, we show that increased corpo...

Abstract This paper measures the relative importance of quality and quantity eects,of cor- porate taxation on foreign direct investment. Taxes reduce the equilibrium stock of foreign capital in a given country (quantity eect),and decrease the extent to which investment contributes to the corporate tax base (quality eect).,We build a model with hete...

Abstract This paper studies corporate,taxation in a model,where,foreign investment,of …rms may,a¤ect the pro…tability of the investor …rm’s domestic,activities. In this framework, corporate taxes distort the quality, not just the quantity of foreign direct investment ‡ows. Moreover, the e¤ect of taxes on capital ‡ows is ambiguous in our model, i.e....

Recently, Gordon, Kalambokidis & Slemrod (2003b) have suggested a measure of the marginal tax burden on investment which is based on the comparison between the actual tax revenue and the revenue which is generated by a cash ow tax system, which leaves the marginal investment untaxed. This paper develops a modi…ed GKS measure which allows to relax s...