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In many countries entrepreneurship is promoted through tax reductions for small businesses and by various government support schemes. We analyze the effects of such policies to subsidize small businesses in a setting where both the risk-return characteristics of the selected innovation project and the mode of commercialization chosen by entrepreneurs (market entry versus sale to an incumbent firm) are endogenous. We show that government programs to support small businesses foster market entry by entrepreneurs but, at the same time, give an incentive to choose low risk projects, due to the existence of limited loss offset provisions. This points to a basic trade-off between the goals of raising competition in technology-intensive markets and the desire of governments to foster risky 'breakthrough' innovations.

An important puzzle in corporate taxation is that effective tax rates have fallen significantly while tax revenue has simultaneously risen in most countries. Moreover, the gross profitability of firms seems to be lower in high-tax countries, even though standard models of international investment would yield the opposite conclusion. We offer an explanation for these stylized facts by setting up a simple two-country model of tax competition with heterogeneous firms. In this model a unique, asymmetric Nash equilibrium can be shown to exist, provided that countries are sufficiently different with respect to their exogenous market conditions. In equilibrium the larger country levies the higher tax rate and attracts the high-cost firms. A simultaneous expansion of both markets intensifies tax competition and causes both countries to reduce their tax rates, despite higher corporate tax bases.

This paper analyses tax competition between a unionised and a non-unionised country for the location of an outside firm. We show that unionisation offers an extra incentive for the government to attract a foreign competitor to a concentrated domestic market, in order to affect the behaviour of the domestic union. This results in the unionised country's government offering a tax discount (or a subsidy premium) to the outside firm in excess of what is needed to compensate the investor for the higher union wage. In equilibrium, therefore, the unionised country can attract the outside firm even if it has other location disadvantages, such as a smaller home market.

The rise in foreign direct investment and the increasing activity of multinational firms expose national corporate tax bases to cross-country profit shifting, but also lead to rising profitability of the corporate sector. We incorporate these two effects of economic integration into a simple political economy model where the median voter decides on a redistributive income tax rate. In this setting economic integration may raise or lower the equilibrium tax rate, depending on whether the higher excess burden of the tax or the larger redistributive gains from the perspective of the representative worker are the dominant effect. Our simple model holds several implications for future empirical work on the relationship between globalization and the effective rate of capital taxation.

The paper employs a standard model of dynamic price competition to study how international principles of value-added taxation affect the stability of collusive agreements when producers in an international duopoly agree not to export into each other's home market and tax rates differ across countries. In this framework, tacit collusion may be more likely to break up under either the destination of the origin principle, depending on the relation between costs of production and market size. A robust result is that tax rate harmonization increases the likehood of tacit collusion under both tax principles considered.

A two-sector trade model with perfect international capital mobility and endogenous supply of specific factors is used to analyze the relation between selective taxes on production (origin-based commodity taxes) and source-based taxes on capital income. A small open economy will set both of these taxes equal to zero when it is able to tax all specific factors optimally. In the absence of a domestic motive for capital taxation a switch towards origin-based commodity taxes leads to a negative source tax on capital (i.e., a subsidy). However, when one of the specific factors is in fixed supply and cannot be taxed by a separate instrument, then the optimal capital tax rate is positive and may be further increased by the introduction of a selective production tax.

The paper analyzes the implications of allowing for trade deflection under the restricted origin principle. It is shown that (a) producer trade deflection leads to circular trade and must be ruled out to obtain a trade equilibrium, (b) consumer trade deflection will not occur in a Nash equilibrium when transaction costs are linear (zero) and tax rates are endogenized, (c) with strictly convex transaction costs model results do not differ qualitatively from those obtained in the absence of trade deflection. Together, these results give some theoretical support for the no cross-hauling assumption typically used in multi-country trade modelling.