Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Tax Havens And Effective Tax Rates: An Analysis Of Private Versus Public European Firms, John Thornton, Aziz Jaafar

John Thornton

We examine the impact of tax haven operations on the effective corporate tax burdens of publicly listed and privately held firms domiciled in Europe. In particular, we consider how European firms' tax haven operations interact with factors such as listing status and home-country tax reporting systems to determine the relative tax burdens of publicly listed and private firms. Our main empirical results show that tax haven operations are associated with lower effective tax rates for both private and public firms, and that the impact of tax havens in lowering effective tax rates is more pronounced for private firms than for …