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Corporate taxation and the choice of patent location within multinational firms

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  • Karkinsky, Tom
  • Riedel, Nadine

Abstract

Corporate patents are important assets in the modern economy, where knowledge is highly valued. In many multinational enterprises (MNEs), they constitute a major portion of the business's value. The intra-firm transfer pricing process for patent-related royalty payments is moreover often highly intransparent and patents thus represent a major source of profit shifting opportunities between multinational entities. For both reasons, MNEs have an incentive to locate their patents at low-tax affiliates to minimize the corporate tax burden. The purpose of our paper is to empirically test for this relationship by exploiting a unique dataset that links information on patent applications to micro panel data for European MNEs. Our results suggest that the corporate tax rate (differential to other group members) exerts a negative effect on the number of patent applications filed by a multinational affiliate. The effect is quantitatively large and robust to controlling for firm size and unobserved heterogeneity between the entities. The findings moreover prevail if we account for royalty withholding taxes and binding ‘Controlled Foreign Company’ rules.

Suggested Citation

  • Karkinsky, Tom & Riedel, Nadine, 2012. "Corporate taxation and the choice of patent location within multinational firms," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(1), pages 176-185.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:inecon:v:88:y:2012:i:1:p:176-185
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2012.04.002
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Corporate taxation; Multinational enterprise; Profit shifting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
    • F23 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - Multinational Firms; International Business
    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
    • C33 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models

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