Shift or Share? Anatomy of Profit Shifting and Distributional Effects on Workers

Using exhaustive microdata on the worldwide activity of multinational firms from Country-by-Country Reports linked to employer-employee data, we study how profit shifting affects workers' earnings. We estimate that large French multinationals shift 19% of their foreign profits annually to low-tax jurisdictions, resulting in €10.3 billion shifted out of France and €3.7 billion in lost tax revenues. Exploiting France's mandatory profit-sharing policy, which mechanically links subsidiary-level reported profits to workers' compensation, we show that profit shifting reduces annual employees' earnings by 2.6%. Low-income workers are disproportionately affected, the bottom 10% losing 3.2% of wages compared to 2.3% for top 10% earners. Changing the profit-sharing formula to account for global, rather than subsidiary-level, profitability would increase wages by 1.9% overall and 4.1% for workers in profit-shifting subsidiaries.