Multinational enterprises and corporate taxation:

Conditional on locating in a particular country, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have the continuous choice of the size of investment and of the financial structure. Subsequently, conditional on these decisions, MNEs can decide the reallocation of realized profits among their affiliate locations worldwide by applying various tax avoidance strategies of income shifting. This doctoral thesis empirically assesses corporate tax effects on the location decision of MNEs’ assets, profits and debt. Thereby, the aim is to analyze with a large database of European MNEs (AMADEUS) and with modern and sophisticated econometric methods that explicitly control for unobserved heterogeneity between multinational affiliates if corporate taxes and, more precisely, corporate tax rate differences between affiliates of MNEs are relevant on these two levels of decision and, if yes, to determine the extent of these tax effects.