Tax planning by firms and tax competition by goverments

Abstract

This thesis investigates tax planning by firms and tax com petition by governments. We begin in Chapter 1 by outlining the background, motivation and plan of the thesis. Chapter 2 reviews the relevant existing literature. This begins with a review of the canonical tax competition model. Estimates of the tax burden suggest an important role for nniltinational firms in explaining international tax reforms. Mindful of the variety of tax planning strategies available to multinational firms, we review estimates of the relative importance of tax planning by firms in explaining trends in tax burdens. We finish our review of the literature with a discussion of some recent papers which investigate the tax plaim ing decisions made by firms.