Introduction
Amazon, Caterpillar, Google, and Starbucks are just a few examples of multinational firms that
recently managed to make headlines with creative tax avoidance strategies.1 Abundant anecdotal
evidence is in accord with rigorous research results confirming the existence of various forms of
international tax planning by multinational firms.
While the above examples are all US‐based firms, increasing availability of administrative data for
research purposes has enabled researchers to study not only behavioural responses of US‐based
firms to taxation, but also of European and other multinationals. For example, researchers have
analysed European financial data such as Amadeus (from Bureau van Dijk), tax return data, and the
German MiDi dataset. The MiDi is a confidential database available at the research centre of the
Deutsche Bundesbank and it includes all German enterprises investing abroad and satisfying the
reporting requirements (cf. Lipponer, 2011).
As shown in Figure 1, the German statutory corporate income tax rate has fallen by half from 60
percent in 1981 to some 30 percent in 2014, while this is still above the simple OECD average. The
survey of Leibrecht and Hochgatterer (2012) suggests that the pattern of declining corporate tax
rates of OECD members is driven by tax competition between countries that compete for corporate
tax base and foreign firms. In Germany, in spite of declining tax rates, the ratio of revenues from
corporate income to GDP has been rather stable in the last few years at around 2 percent (5 percent
of total revenues). This stability of corporate tax revenues is, in part, due to an increase in the share
of the incorporated sector (Fuest and Weichenrieder, 2002).