Work in progress

The Global Allocation of Extractive Windfalls, with Ninon Moreau-Kastler.

Profits of oil, gas and mining companies are strongly linked to commodity prices, but little is known on how those windfall profits are shared between corporations and states. To answer this question, we build a new dataset covering a large share of tax payments made by extractive firms worldwide by combining all mandatory reports on their tax payments. Using this new dataset, we estimate that a 1% increase in commodity prices results in a 0.45% increase in fiscal windfalls for states, with significant heterogeneity across types of payments and countries. In a second part, we investigate how fluctuations in profits arising from commodity price changes are distributed worldwide using a multi-country unconsolidated firm-level database matched with production data covering a large number of extractive firms from 2012 to 2022. We find that the profits of subsidiaries located in tax havens are more elastic to changes in commodity prices compared to other subsidiaries.

Profit Shifting by Large Multinational Firms: Evidence from France, with Giulia Aliprandi, Manon François and Laure Heidmann.

This paper uses newly available microdata from country-by-country reporting (CbCR) to study the profit-shifting behavior of large French multinational firms. We provide a robust methodology to correct CbCR from double counting of intra-group dividends, which we show inflates observed pre-tax profits by about 13%. Using corrected data, we show that about 23% of foreign profits cannot be explained by real activity. We also find that 18% of profits are shifted for tax reasons, with two-thirds going to four tax havens. We also provide evidence on the concentration of profit shifting in the hands of a few large firms: 6% of MNFs account for two-thirds of the total profit shifting. 

Taxes and Intellectual Property Licensing, with Laurie Ciaramella.

Using micro data on trade in services matched to patent data and exploiting a reform restraining the use of Patent Boxes , this project studies how multinational firms strategically locate their intellectual property to shift profits to low-tax countries and measures the tax losses through this channel.