Multinationals and services imports from havens: when policies stand in the way of tax planning
March 16, 2023
Multinational groups have been in the spotlight because of their activities that shift profits to tax havens, allowing them to minimize corporate tax bills in high-tax countries. The literature has documented several strategies used by multinationals to shift profits. This paper studies one strategy for which systematic empirical evidence is relatively scarce: the use of intra-group services transactions. Under this route, the firms of the group located in high-tax countries may artificially inflate their costs by paying expensive fees for services (e.