Strategic Consolidation Under Formula Apportionment

Thiess Buettner, Nadine Riedel and Marco Runkel ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Thiess Büttner

National Tax Journal, 2011, vol. 64, issue 2, 225-54

Abstract: This paper argues that profit-shifting activities exist for multi-jurisdictional enterprises (MJEs) under a tax system of consolidation and formula apportionment (FA). A theoretical model discusses how a MJE can exploit strategically its impact on the definition of the consolidated group. The analysis shows that the MJE will not consolidate if intra-group tax-rate differences — and thereby potential gains from profit shifting — are large. We test this prediction using confidential firm-level tax-return data for the local business tax in Germany. The identification strategy exploits a quasi-experiment derived from a major company tax reform in 2001 that significantly reduced the costs associated with separating out individual affiliates. Our results show that, evaluated at the sample mean, an increase in the tax-rate variance among a MJE’s affiliates by one standard deviation reduces the number of consolidated affiliates by 20 percent.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2011.2.01 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2011.2.01 (text/html)
Access is restricted to subscribers and members of the National Tax Association.

Related works:
Working Paper: Strategic Consolidation under Formula Apportionment (2008)
Working Paper: Strategic Consolidation under Formula Apportionment (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ntj:journl:v:64:y:2011:i:2:p:225-54

Access Statistics for this article

National Tax Journal is currently edited by Stacy Dickert-Conlin and William M. Gentry

More articles in National Tax Journal from National Tax Association, National Tax Journal Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The University of Chicago Press ().