TY  - JOUR
AU  - Markle,Kevin S.
AU  - Shackelford,Douglas
TI  - Do Multinationals or Domestic Firms Face Higher Effective Tax Rates?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15091
PY  - 2009
Y2  - June 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15091
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15091.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Kevin S. Markle
University of Waterloo
E-Mail: ksmarkle@gmail.com

Douglas Shackelford
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Kenan-Flagler Business School
Campus Box 3490, McColl Building
Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3490
Tel: 919/962-3197
Fax: 919/962-4727
E-Mail: doug_shack@unc.edu
AB  - To our knowledge, this paper provides the most comprehensive analysis of firm-level corporate income tax expenses to date.  We use publicly available financial statement information to estimate firm-level effective tax rates (ETRs) for 10,642 corporations from 85 countries from 1988 to 2007.  We find that multinationals and domestic-only companies face similar ETRs.  We also find that, on average, ETRs declined by seven percentage points or 20% over the period.  German, Japanese, Australian and Canadian decreases were large.  American, British, and French declines were more modest.  Nonetheless, because ETRs were falling worldwide, the ordinal rank from high-tax countries to low-tax countries changed little.  Japanese firms always faced the highest ETRs.  ETRs for tax havens and countries from the Middle East and Asia (ignoring Japan) were always lower than those for the U.S. and European countries.  These findings should provide some empirical underpinning for ongoing policy debates about the taxation of multinational profits.
ER  -