Taxing Internationally Mobile Individuals—A Case of Countervailing Incentives

With internationally mobile labour and the abolition of national border controls, the individual may not only have private information about his skill level (adverse selection), but also about the length of time he resides and works in the home country (moral hazard) and about his foreign income. To reduce domestic income taxes, the individual has an incentive to understate his domestic utility and to exaggerate the utility he could obtain by spending additional time abroad. Under the reasonable assumption that these are positively correlated, incentives are countervailing. The optimal government policy may be implemented by a tax schedule containing negative, zero, and positive marginal income tax rates.     

Repeated auctions of franchises for nonrenewable resources

In maximizing the net total government take from exploitation of nonrenewable natural resource endowments, the government faces the problem that extraction companies possess private information about extraction capacities (adverse selection). In a repeated auctions model, I show that it is optimal to deviate from bidding parity, even in the absence of moral hazard. The second period auction is biased to mitigate the externality problem that stems from intertemporal dynamics in extraction costs.This research has been financed by the Research Council of Norway. I would like to thank K»re P, Hagen, Geir B. Asheim, Diderik Lund, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. I have also benefited from comments at a seminar at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and at the International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF), 51st congress, Lisbon, August 1995. The paper is a refined version of Discussion paper 1/95, Institute of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.     

Asymmetry and uncertainty in capital formation: an application to oil investment

Theories of irreversible investment suggest a negative relation between investment and uncertainty, and nonlinear adjustment costs open for asymmetries in the adjustment of fixed capital. We propose an econometric modelling approach to estimate and test the key predictions of modern investment theory, including asymmetric dynamics and various uncertainty indicators. Our application on a data set from the oil industry offers empirical support for both asymmetric dynamics and uncertainty in oil and gas investment.     

Transfer pricing in vertically integrated industries

Tax officials judge whether a multinational’s transfer price is consistent with the arm’s-length standard, the price at which two independent firms would carry out a similar transaction, by using data from comparable but independent transactions. In vertically integrated industries, the only source of comparable data may be from controlled (nonindependent) transactions. Conventional wisdom asserts that standard arm’s-length methods cannot perform well in such markets because the comparability rules encourage the integrated firms to collude tacitly on transfer prices in a way that amplifies tax-differential incentives. In this paper, we show that strategic linkages between vertically integrated firms operating in the same final good market moderate, and can possibly reverse, tax-differential incentives if the correct comparison method is used. The Cost-Plus method turns out to be the most effective in limiting the equilibrium amount of profit-shifting out of the high-tax country and it yields the highest tax revenues for the high-tax country. These benefits are shown to strengthen when the firms have private cost information.      

Industry upheaval and valuation: Empirical evidence from the international oil and gas industry

Accounting literature suggests that contemporaneous earnings are more useful than current operating cash flow in predicting future cash flows and, therefore, also more relevant for company valuation. However, recent research indicates that elevated levels of merger and acquisition activity or a changing economic environment may reduce the value relevance of earnings. Using the oil and gas industry as a case, this paper examines how the oil industry upheaval in the late 1990s influenced the value relevance of financial statement information. We extend the literature by testing for a structural shift in the equity market valuation process. Our results provide evidence of a structural break in the value relevance of accounting information. In contrast to prior research, we find that the value relevance of cash flows actually decreased in the recent oil industry upheaval. On the other hand, the value relevance of book equity increased. Furthermore, we find that accounting-method choice (full cost versus successful efforts) affects the value relevance of accounting information.     

Regulation of common property resources under private information about resource externalities

Optimal marginal investment incentives and optimal entry regulations are developed for a case where heterogeneous firms exploit a common property natural resource. The government’s objectives are to correct for resource externalities and to tax away the resource rent. Both individual output and efficiency levels are subject to private information, i.e. it is a model with multi-agency, externalities, and countervailing incentives. There are asymmetric information about the net revenue of the firm and the size of the resource externalities that the firm inflicts on the other firms in the industry. The latter implies that external effects are present both in the firms’ net incomes and in the information rents.