Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/102186 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 4921
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
This paper investigates the tax responsiveness of multinational firms' investment decisions in foreign countries, distinguishing firms that are able to avoid taxes (avoiders) from those that are not (non-avoiders). From a theoretical point of view, the tax responsiveness of firms crucially depends on this distinction. Empirically, however, a firm's ability to avoid profit taxes is inherently unobservable to the researcher. To address this problem, we use a finite mixture modeling approach which allows us to distinguish avoiders from non-avoiders stochastically from a mixture of distributions of the two types of firms. Using panel data on the universe of foreign affiliates of German multinational firms over the years 1999 to 2010, we find that investments of tax avoiders do not respond to host-country profit taxes at all, while those of non-avoiders do. About 11% of the affiliates are estimated to be able to avoid taxes. These investments account for about 58% of the stock of foreign fixed assets held by German multinational firms abroad. A one-percentage-point increase in the statutory corporate profit tax rate of a host country is found to reduce the fixed assets of non-avoiders in that host country by 0.81%.
Subjects: 
corporate profit taxation
multinational firms
profit shifting
tax avoidance
tax elasticity
finite-mixture model
firm-level data
JEL: 
C35
C38
F23
H32
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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