Tax effects on international business activities
Tax effects on international business activities
Period:
01.01.2008 – 31.12.2009
The aim of this research project is to analyze empirically the impacts of company taxation on decisions of multinational companies. Both real investment decisions and the design of business activities seem to be affected by company taxation. The interaction between real investment decisions and other tax planning channels such as financing or transfer pricing of intra-firm transactions is particularly interesting. Additional empirical evidence is relevant for a better understanding of tax effects on investments and tax revenues. The empirical analysis is based on data of German multinationals. The project aims to analyse the tax planning activities of multinational German companies using firm-level data about investment behaviour provided by the FDI micro database (MiDi) of the Deutsche Bundesbank. In the first phase of this project, various tax planning strategies of German multinationals such as cross-country profit shifting by means of financial decisions or transfer-pricing of intra-firm transactions were identified. Furthermore, it was analyzed how this tax planning strategies are restricted by anti-avoidance rules such as thin-capitalization rules. In the second phase of the project, the focus is on the interactions between different tax planning channels such as investment and profit allocation.
