An open question in the literature on the taxation of multinational corporations is whether repatriation taxes influence whether the profits of foreign subsidiaries are repatriated or reinvested abroad. Theoretical models suggest that dividend remittances should not be influenced by repatriation taxes. The results of recent empirical work indicate that dividend remittances are sensitive to repatriation taxes. This paper investigates whether the empirical evidence can be reconciled with the theoretical results by recognizing that repatriation taxes on dividends may vary over time and provide firms with an incentive to time repatriations so that they occur in years when repatriation tax rates are relatively low. We use information about cross-country differences in tax rates to separately estimate the influence of permanent tax changes, as would occur due to changes in statutory tax rates, and transitory tax changes on dividend repatriations. Our data contains U.S. tax return information for a large sample of U.S. corporations and their foreign subsidiaries. We find that the permanent tax price effect is significantly different from the transitory price effect and is not significantly different from zero, while the transitory tax price effect is negative and significant. This suggests that repatriation taxes do affect dividend repatriation behavior but only to the extent that they vary over time. Previous empirical work has apparently measured the effect of timing behavior.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
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Length: Date of creation: Mar 1994 Date of revision: Publication status: published as The Effects of Taxation on Multinational Corporations, eds. Martin Feldstein, James R. Hines, Jr. and R. Glenn Hubbard; University of Chicago Press, 1995. Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4667
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Find related papers by JEL classification: H32 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Firm H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
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Roger H. Gordon & James R. Hines Jr., 2002.
"International Taxation,"
NBER Working Papers
8854, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Other versions:
Gordon, Roger H. & Hines, James Jr, 2002.
"International taxation,"
Handbook of Public Economics,
in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 28, pages 1935-1995
Elsevier.
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