Do U.S. Multinationals Face Different Tax Burdens than Do Other Companies?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper address two policy questions: Do U.S. multinationals face a different tax burden than companies that do business only in the U.S.? Do U.S. multinationals face a different tax burden from multinationals that are incorporated in other countries? These questions are important because differences in tax burden can affect where firms incorporate (i.e., establish their legal domicile) and can entice them to relocate. Answers to these questions may shed light on current policy issues, such as inversions and responses to the World Trade Organization. The paper reviews the extant empirical evidence related to inferences of a U.S. multinational's "tax competitiveness" and offers new evidence comparing the average tax rates of U.S. multinationals to both U.S. domestics and to non-U.S. multinationals. In assessing evidence related to whether the U.S. tax system results in U.S. companies becoming attractive takeover targets for non-U.S. companies, we review studies comparing the tax liabilities of U.S. companies that are foreign-controlled to those that are U.S.-controlled. We provide new data on the cost of U.S. domicile for multinationals for the years 1992 to 1997. These new data update and expand Collins and Shackelford (1995), which compared the average tax rates of U.S. multinationals to domestic only companies' average tax rates and to U.K. and Canadian multinationals' average tax rates during the 1980s. Because of substantial changes in international business and tax since the 1980s, this update enables us to test whether what tax costs of being a U.S. multinational have changed since then. We find that companies domiciled in the U.S face higher tax burdens than U.S. domestic-only companies, higher tax burdens than Canadian multinationals, and similar tax burdens to British multinationals. Based on our review of prior evidence and the new evidence presented here, the evidence is consistent with at least some U.S. companies facing heavier tax burdens because they are globally positioned.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".