TY  - JOUR
AU  - Markle,Kevin S.
AU  - Shackelford,Douglas A.
TI  - Cross-Country Comparisons of Corporate Income Taxes
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16839
PY  - 2011
Y2  - February 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16839
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16839.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 taxes to date. We use publicly available financial statement information for 11,602 public corporations from 82 countries from 1988 to 2009 to estimate country-level effective tax rates (ETRs). We find that the location of a multinational and its subsidiaries substantially affects its worldwide ETR.  Japanese firms always faced the highest ETRs. U.S. multinationals are among the highest taxed. Multinationals based in tax havens face the lowest taxes. We find that ETRs have been falling over the last two decades; however, the ordinal rank from high-tax countries to low-tax countries has changed little. We also find little difference between the ETRs of multinationals and domestic-only firms. Besides enhancing our knowledge about international taxes, these findings should provide some empirical underpinning for ongoing policy debates about the taxation of multinationals.
ER  -