abuse of market power how should competition law deal with anti competitive behaviour by firms with market power in the light of recent ec and us cases this is perhaps the most controversial current issue for competition policy lax policy would jeopardise the competitiveness of markets but rigid policy would chill pro competitive pro consumer conduct this paper gives an economic assessment of evolving legal standards in the area the importance of developing a stronger economic basis for ec law on abuse of market dominance is stressed

impact of emission regulation policies on chinese power firms reusable environmental investments and sustainable operations abstract this study investigates the impact of emission regulation policies i e emergency response policy versus long term protection policy on the investment levels of reusable environmental facilities e g desulphurization pumps used by coal fired power plants in china to improve their sustainable operations to set up a baseline for further analysis and compare the impact of emission regulation policies an improved framework for performance evaluation of sustainable operations is developed in this study by integrating classical data envelopment analysis dea and exponential learning curve the proposed mathematical models are applied into an empirical study of 27 major million kw coal fired power plants in mainland china empirical analysis shows that the interactions among official emission regulation policies reusable environmental investment rei and sustainable operations management of coal fired power plants in china several policy suggestions are provided for power firm managers and policy makers in china specifically we suggest that the chinese government should implement long term protection policies in less developed regions instead of emergency response policies

cross jurisdictional income shifting and earnings valuation this research investigates the extent to which u s multinational enterprises mnes engage in tax motivated income shifting between the u s and foreign jurisdictions and whether investors differentially capitalize shifted income based on its true source or its reported source we find evidence that u s mnes facing foreign tax rates that on average exceed the u s statutory tax rate shift taxable income into the united states and that investors recognize firms income shifting patterns when valuing the foreign versus domestic components of reported earnings we examine u s multinational manufacturing companies from 1984 to 1992 to determine the cross sectional relation between firm level foreign profit margins and average foreign tax rates if u s mnes respond to high low foreign tax rates by shifting income into out of the united states then ceteris paribus we expect a negative relation between foreign profit margins and average foreign tax rates in addition

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

on optimal legal standards for competition policy a general welfare based analysis we present a new welfare based framework for optimally choosing legal standards decision rules we formalise the decision theoretic considerations widely discussed in the existing literature by capturing the quality of the underlying analysis and information available to a regulatory authority and we obtain a precise necessary and sufficient set of conditions for determining when an economics or effects based approach would be able to discriminate effectively between benign and harmful actions and consequently dominate per se as a decision making procedure we then show that in a full welfare based approach the choice between legal standards must additionally take into account i indirect deterrence effects of the choice of standard on the behaviour of all firms when deciding whether or not to adopt a particular practice and ii procedural effects of certain features of the administrative process in particular delays in reaching decisions and the investigation of only a fraction of the actions taking place we therefore derive necessary and sufficient conditions for adopting discriminating rules as advocated by the effects based approach we also examine what type of discriminating rule will be optimal under different conditions that characterise different business practices we apply our framework to two recent landmark decisions microsoft vs eu commission 2007 and leegin vs psks 2007 in which a change in legal standards has been proposed and show that it can powerfully clarify and enhance the arguments deployed in these cases

corporate multistate tax planning benefits of multiple jurisdictions abstract we investigate how firms use differences in state income tax regimes to lower their state tax burdens we develop a model that predicts that firms state effective tax rates first decrease then increase as a function of the number of states in which they file returns using firm level data we find evidence consistent with the model s predictions and we estimate that such rates are minimized at 24 states consistent with predictions from prior literature our evidence also suggests that firms use sales factor apportionment to reduce state tax burdens

taxes and the division of foreign operating income among royalties interest dividends and retained earnings abstract how do taxes influence the way u s corporations divide foreign affiliate operating income among royalties dividends interest and retained earnings the paper goes beyond previous work that focused largely on dividend repatriation behavior and provides a comprehensive analysis of the disposition of foreign subsidiary operating income the empirical results show that taxes have a large and statistically significant effect on the composition of payments own tax prices discourage the payment of dividends royalties and interest but dividend and other repatriation taxes do not increase retained earnings they only alter the composition of payments the results are therefore consistent with a generalized hartman sinn model of the mature controlled foreign corporation that has various alternative repatriation vehicles finally this paper integrates the choice of payments with income shifting among countries because the latter may be part of a low tax strategy for repatriations in this general framework conventional composite tax prices are not appropriate because the response to a change in a composite tax price depends on which components changed

does environmental regulation affect energy efficiency in china s thermal power generation empirical evidence from a slacks based dea model abstract data envelopment analysis dea has gained much popularity in performance measurement of power industry this paper presents a slack based measure approach to investigating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and the environmental regulation of china s thermal power generation we first calculate the total factor energy efficiency without considering environmental constraints an environmental performance indicator is proposed through decomposing the total factor energy efficiency the proposed approach is then employed to examine whether environmental regulation affects the energy efficiency of china s thermal power generation we find that the environmental efficiency plays a significant role in affecting energy performance of china s thermal generation sector decreasing the discharge of major pollutants can improve both energy performance and environmental efficiency besides we also have three main findings 1 the energy efficiency and environmental efficiency were relatively low 2 the energy and environmental efficiency scores show great variations among provinces 3 both energy efficiency and environmental efficiency are of obvious geographical characteristics according to our findings we suggest some policy implications

optimal path for controlling co2 emissions in china a perspective of efficiency analysis this paper examines the optimal control of co2 emissions from a perspective of efficiency analysis several centralized data envelopment analysis dea models are introduced to study the optimal allocation of co2 emissions under spatial temporal and spatial temporal allocation strategies respectively the models have been used to determine the optimal paths for controlling co2 emissions at provincial and regional levels in china a sensitivity analysis of the optimal path on the emission control coefficient under spatial temporal allocation strategy is further carried out our empirical results show that more developed regions should take emission reduction responsibility earlier than less developed regions in china of the three allocation strategies spatial temporal allocation strategy seems to be a better choice for achieving the optimal control of co2 emissions at country level since it is more encompassing by allowing both timing and spatial substitutions it is also found that there exists an inverted u shape relationship between the aggregate optimal gdp and the emission control coefficient which shows that modest emission reduction policy might be more appropriate for china in order to achieve the joint goals of economic development and co2 emission reduction

the impact of china s carbon allowance allocation rules on the product prices and emission reduction behaviors of ets covered enterprises abstract it is an important task for china to allocate carbon emission allowance to realize its carbon reduction target and establish carbon trading market china has designed several allocation rules within seven pilot regions what influence those rules may cause is closely related with the enthusiasm of emission trading scheme ets covered enterprises participation in carbon market and more importantly with the mechanism design and sustainable development of carbon market for this purpose the multi stage profit model is developed to analyze the ets covered enterprises product prices and emission reduction behaviors under different allocation rules the results show that first under the rules of grandfathering self declaration and auctioning when deciding the optimal product price and optimal carbon emission reduction those enterprises may focus on maximizing current stage profit however under the rule of benchmarking those enterprises may care more about the impact of current decisions on the profit in next stage second the optimal product price policy is positively correlated with the price of the same kind products consumers low carbon awareness and government subsidy finally along with the increase of carbon price consumers low carbon awareness and government subsidy and the decrease of carbon emission cap those enterprises tend to reduce carbon emissions

global organizations and taxes an analysis of the dividend interest royalty and management fee payments between u s multinationals foreign affiliates abstract we examine the effects of taxes on cross border dividend interest royalty and management fee payments between foreign affiliates of u s multinationals using 1990 tax return information on transfers totaling 22 8 billion and spanning 71 countries we find dividend royalty and sometimes interest payments between foreign affiliates are negatively correlated with the net tax levied on cross border transfers we find no evidence management fees are structured to mitigate non u s taxes thus taxes affect the location of the supplier and the terms of the contracts for the provision of equity and intangible capital within the worldwide organization

state and provincial corporate tax planning income shifting and sales apportionment factor management abstract we empirically document a strategy through which corporations avoid state income taxes examining aggregated american state and canadian provincial data from 1983 1991 we find corporate income tax revenues are concave in corporate tax rates consistent with firms shifting their tax bases to more favourably taxed jurisdictions additional tests exploit unique features of state formula apportionment systems and find manufacturing shipments from states that tax outside their borders throwback states are decreasing in corporate income tax rates on sales

non parametric productivity analysis with undesirable outputs an application to the canadian pulp and paper industry this article extends the chavas cox approach to non parametric analysis by incorporating undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology inner and outer non parametric technology bounds are constructed the methods are illustrated with application to time series data for the canadian pulp and paper industry conventional measures that ignore changes in pollutant outputs underestimate true productivity growth further there is a large gap between estimates generated with reference to inner and outer bounds to the technology suggesting that researchers need to be aware of the limitations of results derived from analyses relying only on dea methods copyright 2001 oxford university press

the impacts of public sustainability concerns on length of product line abstract this paper studies how the public sustainability concerns affect a firm s decisions of product line design under different channel structures both centralized distribution channel and decentralized distribution channel are taken into consideration our research shows that the public sustainability concerns can make the centralized firm shorten its product line when the coefficient of consumer mismatching disutility is moderate in addition when the centralized firm makes the decision of product line extension from the aspect of maximizing social welfare a relative low level of the public sustainability concerns can incent it to extend the product line the public sustainability concerns are shown to be able to weaken the positive impact of channel decentralization that has on product line extension when the coefficient of consumer mismatching disutility is moderate as well

undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations abstract efficiency measurement is usually based on the assumption that inputs have to be minimized and outputs have to be maximized in a growing number of applications however undesirable outputs are incorporated into the production model which have to be minimized in this paper various approaches for treating such outputs in the framework of data envelopment analysis dea are discussed and the resulting efficient frontiers are compared new radial measures are introduced which assume that any change of the output level will involve both undesirable and desirable outputs

coveting thy neighbor s manufacturing the dilemma of state income apportionment abstract this paper investigates the economic impact of the apportionment formulae used to divide corporate income taxes among the states most apportionment formulae by including payroll turn the state corporate income tax at least partially into a payroll tax using panel data from 1978 1994 the results show that this distortion has an important effect on state level employment for the average state reducing the payroll weight from one third to one quarter increases manufacturing employment around 1 1 concentrated in durable goods manufacturing and with larger effects in the long run the results also suggest that apportionment changes have important negative externalities on other states on average the aggregate effects of apportionment formula changes are close to zero

geographic income shifting by multinational corporations in response to tax rate changes we investigate geographic income shifting by 191 u s multinational corporations in response to worldwide changes in tax rates during 1984 90 between 1984 and 1986 the united kingdom reduced corporate tax rates from a maximum of 45 to 35 and in 1985 france reduced rates from 50 to 45 following these reductions in european rates the united states reduced top corporate tax rates from 46 to 34 between 1986 and 1988 canadian rates increased between 1984 and 1986 and then decreased through 1989 beginning in 1988 numerous countries enacted tax cuts apparently in response to those that occurred earlier in other countries as discussed in section 3 differential changes in tax rates provide incentives for geographic income shifting by multinational firms we identify two subperiods during 1984 90 in which relative tax rate changes

regional allocation of co2 emissions allowance over provinces in china by 2020 the mitigation efforts of china are increasingly important for meeting global climate target since the rapid economic growth of china has led to an increasing share in the world s total co2 emissions this paper sets out to explore the approach for realizing china s national mitigation targets submitted to the unfccc as part of the copenhagen accord that is to reduce the intensity of co2 emissions per unit of gdp by 40 45 by 2020 as well as reducing the energy intensity and increasing the share of non fossil fuel consumption through regional allocation of emission allowance over china s provinces since the realization of china s mitigation target essentially represents a total amount emission allowance allocation problem an improved zero sum gains data envelopment analysis optimization model which could deal with the constant total amount resources allocation is proposed in this study by utilizing this model and based on several scenarios of china s economic growth co2 emissions and energy consumption a new efficient emission allowance allocation scheme on provincial level for china by 2020 is proposed the allocation results indicate that different provinces have to shoulder different mitigation burdens in terms of emission intensity reduction energy intensity reduction and share of non fossil fuels increase

exploring the role delaware plays as a domestic tax haven abstract we examine whether delaware is a domestic tax haven we find that taxes play an economically important role in determining whether u s firms locate subsidiaries in delaware and that a delaware based state tax avoidance strategy lowers state effective tax rates by between 0 7 and 1 1 percentage points on average the tax savings represent a 15 24 decrease in the state income tax burden and translate to an increase in net income of 1 04 1 47 however we find that the tax benefits of delaware tax strategies are diminishing over time in response to initiatives by state governments to limit multistate tax avoidance

the limits of antitrust the author argues that the inhospitality tradition in antitrust has serious costs and causes judges to reject economically beneficial business practices he also contends that the main alternative to the inhospitality tradition the rule of reason enunciated by the supreme court does not provide useful guidance to judges in antitrust because it is completely open ended and provides no assistance in determining how to weigh the relevant factors he then proposes his own alternative approach error cost framework to deciding anti trust cases specifically he suggests that judges should mimic the approach taken by economists and deploy a series of presumptions or filters to guide their inquiry the author believes this would make it easier for businesses to plan their affairs and also reduce litigation costs

income shifting investment and tax competition theory and evidence from provincial taxation in canada abstract we study corporate income taxation when firms operating in multiple jurisdictions can shift income using tax planning strategies because income of corporate groups is not consolidated for tax purposes in canada firms may use financial techniques such as lending among affiliates to reduce subnational corporate taxes a simple theoretical model shows how income shifting affects real investment government revenues and tax base elasticities depending on whether firms must allocate income to provinces or not we then analyze data from administrative tax records to compare the behavior of corporate subsidiaries that may engage in income shifting to comparable firms that must use the statutory allocation formula to determine their taxable income in each province the evidence suggests that income shifting has pronounced effects on provincial tax bases according to our preferred estimate the elasticity of taxable income with respect to tax rates for income shifting firms is 4 9 compared with 2 3 for other comparable firms

empirical tax research in accounting this paper traces the development of archival microeconomic based empirical income tax research in accounting over the last 15 years the paper details three major areas of research i the coordination of tax and non tax factors ii the effects of taxes on asset prices and iii the taxation of multijurisdictional international and interstate commerce methodological concerns of particular interest to this field also are discussed the paper concludes with a discussion of possible directions for future research r 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification m41 h25 k34 g32 f23

decomposition of carbon intensity in electricity production technological innovation and structural adjustment in china s power sector abstract china s power generation accounted for 24 of the world s total output ranking first in 2015 as a suitable performance indicator carbon intensity of electricity reflects a variation in the average level of carbon emissions per unit of electricity generated as the largest carbon emitter among various industries power sector is in duty bound to reduce carbon emissions and achieve sustainable development great progress has been made in china s power sector which is reflected by the effects of technological innovation and structural adjustment with logarithm transformation and integral transformation three dimensional decomposition model is proposed to quantitatively measure the changed carbon intensity of electricity due to technological innovation and structural adjustment in the context of three dimensional model the variation of carbon intensity can be decomposed into absolute changes and or relative changes furthermore accumulative decomposition results are obtained by chain linked calculation rules finally the proposed models are implemented in china s power industry to reveal its historical progress during 1980 2014 some important conclusions are also found based on the decomposition results

a comprehensive analysis of china s regional energy saving and emission reduction efficiency from production and treatment perspectives abstract energy and environmental issues have recently aroused increasing interest in china and many approaches are used to evaluate energy and environmental performance in this paper a two stage network dea framework is applied to evaluate the efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction in china during the period of the eleventh five year plan from 2006 to 2010 in this study economic activities are divided into production and treatment processes this is different from previous research which generally focused on either environmental efficiency or energy efficiency omitting the integration of energy and environmental measures today energy saving and emission reduction are both parts of the basic state policy of china and are equally important the empirical results in this study show that i eastern china has the best energy saving and emission reduction efficiency performing is better than western and central china ii the efficiency of the production process in central china is better than that in western china while the western area performs better than the central area in term of treatment efficiency iii integrated efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction of china was relatively stable in the five years and the pollution treatment efficiency maintained a rising trend

corporate profit tax capital mobility and formula apportionment abstract the paper develops an analytical framework in which regional governments strategically determine the structure of the corporate profit tax system when an apportionment formula determines the proportion of the firms income subject to regional taxation the conclusions can be summarized as follows i regional governments subsidize capital through the corporate tax system ii tax rates become higher and the portion of capital costs that can be deducted from taxable income becomes smaller as the formula weighs more production shares iii the regionally provided good may be below or above the efficient level iv the extent of the distortion depends on the particular formula put into practice v regional governments strictly prefer a formula that exclusively weighs the production proportion to any other alternative

the impact of state taxes on self insurance abstract this paper assesses whether insurers state taxes reduce purchases of property casualty coverage tests are conducted using state aggregates of insurer level data from publicly available annual accounting reports for 1993 1995 a positive relation between self insurance and state taxes is detected consistent with consumers opting to self insure rather than bear the incidence of higher insurer taxes as expected tax effects vary with the elasticity of demand when demand is largely inelastic e g automobile liability coverage taxes do not affect self insurance