Dividend Tax Abuse

Dividend Tax Abuse

Corporate Tax Law

Many corporate tax systems lack structure. Focusing on structural defects and how they are addressed in practice, this comprehensive and comparative analysis of corporate tax systems uses a conceptual framework to illustrate and analyse the many difficult issues corporations pose. This framework is enhanced by the examination of a large body of legal rules and practical considerations which demonstrate how corporate tax systems work in practice. While adopting a broad comparative approach, the analysis also drills down into the detail of influential corporate tax systems in order to illustrate the major issues they face and the options available to them.

International Corporate Tax Avoidance: A Review of the Channels, Magnitudes, and Blind Spots

This paper reviews the rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations. It surveys evidence on main channels of corporate tax avoidance including transfer mispricing, international debt shifting, treaty shopping, tax deferral and corporate inversions. Moreover, it performs a meta analysis of the extensive literature that estimates the overall size of profit shifting. We find that the literature suggests that, on average, a 1 percentage-point lower corporate tax rate will expand before-tax income by 1 percent—an effect that is larger than reported as the consensus estimate in previous surveys and tends to be increasing over time. The literature on tax avoidance still has several unresolved puzzles and blind spots that require further research.