event
Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar
Tuesday
28
May
Farid Toubal

A Fistful of Dollars? Foreign Sales Platforms and Profit Shifting in Tax Havens

Farid Toubal | Professor of Economics at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay
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S4 Petal 2, Maison de la paix, Geneva

The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is the Economics Department's weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics.

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As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series (VPRS) and the Geneva Trade and Development Workshop (GTDW), the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to the public talk


A Fistful of Dollars? Foreign Sales Platforms and Profit Shifting in Tax Havens , given by Farid Toubal (coauthored with Sébastien Laffitte).


Farid Toubal is Professor of Economics at Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay. He is also Scientific Advisor at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) and Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Info. Internationales (CEPII). His current research concentrates on the aggregate consequences of multinational firms’ activities, on the impact of immigration on employment and on cultural influences on trade.


Abstract: We use public macro-level data on the activities of U.S. multinational firms to study how they organize internationally to avoid paying corporate taxes. We document that U.S. firms register their sales in low-tax jurisdictions while producing elsewhere. We propose a parsimonious model to shed light on the fundamental role of foreign  sales platforms in fuelling profits in tax havens. Our quantification shows that profit shifting by foreign sales platforms in tax havens amounts to about $80bn. Our findings suggest that profit apportionment rules which include sales may not efficiently address profit shifting.
 
The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar invites researchers to present their latest work. The seminar takes place on Tuesdays, early afternoons. The organizer for this academic year is Prof.  Julia Cajal-Grossi.