Law Commons^™

Harmful Tax Competition And Its Harmful Remedies, James R. Hines Jr.

Reviews

There is, among some of your reviewer's friends, an abhorrence of tax competition, and a fascination with tax harmonization, that defies simple understanding. The way that the case is typically presented, European tax harmonization is desirable because eliminating tax differences between European nations would promote economic efficiency. With greater economic efficiency, there is more of everything to go around, so it becomes possible to maintain life exactly as it currently is, except that now, instead of every family having one toaster, they can have two. A wise goal, a worthy goal, this economic efficiency-though the drive to eke more out …

Taxation And Multinational Activity: New Evidence, New Interpretations, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

In the midst of rapid integration and globalization, multinational firms still face tax systems that differ among countries, and these differences have the potential to affect major investment and financing decisions. This research covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of indirect taxes as well as of corporate income taxes, the sensitivity of financing decisions to tax rates, the effects of taxes on repatriation policies, the demand for, and impact of, tax havens, and the use of indirect ownership as a means of avoiding taxes. The behavior of US multinational firms as revealed by the evidence collected by …

Tax Arbitrage And The International Tax Regime, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

It is a great pleasure to introduce my student Luca Dell'Anese's book on tax arbitrage. This is an important book on an important topic, which lies at the heart of the current debate on whether an international tax regime exists in practice.

I have argued for many years (see, e.g., Avi-Yonah, 1996, 1997, 2000) that a coherent international tax regime exists, embodied in both the tax treaty network and in domestic laws, and that it forms a significant part of international law (both treatybased and customary). The practical implication is that countries are not free to adopt any international tax …

Tax Treaty Overrides: A Qualified Defence Of U.S. Practice, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

The ability of some countries to unilaterally change, or "override;' their tax treaties through domestic legislation has frequently been identified as a serious threat to the bilateral tax treaty network. In most countries, treaties (including tax treaties) have a status superior to that of ordinary domestic laws (see, e.g. France, Germany, the Netherlands). However, in some countries (primarily the US, but also to some extent the UK and Australia) treaties can be changed unilaterally by subsequent domestic legislation. This result clearly violates international law as embodied by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties ("VCLT"), which is recognized as …

Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can The U.S. Supreme Court And The European Court Of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Last October, a group of distinguished tax experts from the European Union and the United States convened at the University of Michigan Law School for a conference on "Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Justice Tax Jurisprudence." The conference was sponsored by the Law School, the European Union Center, and Harvard Law School's Fund for Tax and Fiscal Research. Attendees from Europe included Michel Aujean, the principal tax official at the EU Commission, Servaas van Thie1, chief tax advisor to the EU Council, Michael Lang (Vienna) and Kees van Raad (Leiden), who run the …

The Three Goals Of Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The current debate in the United States about whether the income tax should be replaced with a consumption tax has been waged on the traditional grounds for evaluating tax policy: efficiency, equity, and administrability. For example, Joseph Bankman and David Weisbach recently argued for the superiority of an ideal consumption tax over an ideal income tax on three grounds: First, that the consumption tax is more efficient because it does not discriminate between current and future consumption,' while both income and consumption taxes have identical effect on work effort. Second, that the consumption tax is at least as good at …