Profit Shifting of Multinational Corporations Worldwide

Abstract

We exploit the new country-by-country reporting data of multinational corporations, with unparalleled country coverage, to reveal the distributional consequences of profit shifting. We estimate that multinational corporations worldwide shifted over $850 billion in profits in 2017, primarily to countries with effective tax rates below 10%. Countries with lower incomes lose a larger share of their total tax revenue due to profit shifting. We further show that a logarithmic function is better suited for capturing the non-linear relationship between profits and tax rates than linear or quadratic functions. Our findings highlight effective tax rates’ importance for profit shifting and tax reforms.

Keywords: multinational corporation, corporate taxation, profit shifting, effective tax rate, country-by-country reporting, global development