Browsing by Subject "economic geography"

When dependent firms trade with one another, no usual market incentives apply to the pricing decision. Prices determined in such a case are called transfer prices. Global differences in corporate tax rates encourage multinational enterprises to manipulate their transfer prices to shift profits to avoid taxes. It is estimated that one third to over half of global trade value is between related parties, making potential tax gains large from transfer mispricing. Literature has proposed transfer mispricing to be one of the major channels for international profit shifting. This thesis examines whether transfer mispricing can be found in export prices of Finnish multinational enterprises. The data set is obtained by merging Finnish Customs data on International Trade in Goods in 2014-2017 and Statistics Finland Enterprise Group Register. By combining the two data sets, information on export prices on firm, product and destination level are tagged with information on dependencies in the destination country. This allows comparing intra-firm trade prices with independent trade prices. The model used to distinguish transfer mispricing is a fixed effects difference-in-differences regression, where differences in independent and dependent export prices are compared in their response to destination tax differences. Information on firm, product, export date and destination characteristics are used to control for differences between independent and dependent trade prices that are not explained by tax motivations. The results provide evidence of transfer mispricing in magnitude comparable to the previous research. A 10 percent decrease in destination tax rate is estimated to lead to 1.2 percent decrease in intra-firm export prices of Finnish multinational enterprises. This implies 0.8 billion euros of underreported exports in 2017, totaling 160 million euros of corporate tax losses. These results are questioned by using a more robust method than applied in previous empirical literature. According to the more conservative estimates, the main evidence of transfer mispricing loses statistical significance. The results give broad confidence intervals for transfer mispricing of Finnish multinational enterprises, which do not cancel out either large-scale profit shifting or nonexistent price manipulation. They encourage further research on the subject exploiting more detailed data on transaction level dependencies. In addition, the role of foreign affiliates in transfer mispricing calls for more detailed data.