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Profit shifting of multinational enterprises: Evidence from Finland

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School of Business | Master's thesis

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en

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84 + 19

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This thesis studies whether Finnish multinational enterprises react to the tax incentives generated by corporate income tax rate differences and shift their profits to low tax countries. The profit shift-ing of Finnish multinational enterprises is estimated by exploiting an affiliate level panel data set for years 2012-2017. This panel data contains detailed information about the ownership as well as accounting information of subsidiaries that have a Finland-based ultimate owner. Applying an esti-mation method introduced also in previous literature, called Hines-Rice approach, and adjusting it to a fixed effects model results in statistically significant tax semi-elasticity estimates between -2.1 to -2.9. These imply that a 10-percentage point tax rate increase in affiliate's home country is related to decreased reported profit before taxation of 21-29% by an affiliate located in that country. The results are confirmed by several robustness checks that all provide similar conclusions. This sug-gests that Finnish multinational enterprises react to tax rate differences through shifting profits. Additionally, results suggest that debt-shifting channel accounts for about one-fifth of total profit shifting. These results confirm results of previous studies and are in line with the theory of profit shifting.

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Mustonen, Mikko
Ropponen, Olli

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Tutkielman tiivistelmätiedoissa näkyvä hyväksymisvuosi on 2020.
The year of approval showing in the abstract of the thesis is 2020.

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