Law Commons^™

A New Framework For Digital Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Karen Sam

Articles

The international tax regime has wide implications for business, trade, and the international political economy. Under current law, multinational enterprises do not pay their fair share of taxes to market countries where profits are generated because market countries are only allowed to tax companies with a physical presence there. Digital companies, like Google and Amazon, can operate entirely online, thereby avoiding market country taxes. Multinationals can also exploit existing tax rules by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding taxes in the residence country where their headquarters are located.

Recently, a global tax deal was reached to tackle these …

Tax Policy And The Efficiency Of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among “tax expenditures” and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other policies inefficiently subsidize U.S. direct investment abroad. Investments are dynamically inefficient if they consistently generate less in returns to investors than they absorb in new investment funds. From 1982–2010, repatriated earnings from foreign affiliates exceeded net capital investments by $1.1 trillion in 2010 dollars, and from 1950–2010, repatriated earnings and net interest from foreign affiliates exceeded net equity …

Reply To Becker And Fuest, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

It is an understatement to say that the appropriate taxation of foreign business income is a controversial and potentially confusing topic. One of the mysteries of international taxation has been that the prescriptions of what, until recently, was the accepted academic wisdom differs so sharply from widespread international practice. In an important contribution, Richman (1963) noted that a home government confronted with the choice of where it would prefer one of its resident taxpayers to allocate a single unit of capital would weigh the after-foreign-tax return from investing abroad against the pre-tax return from investing at home. From this observation, …