Tax incentives and the location of FDI: Evidence from a panel of German multinationals

Using a firm-level panel data set this paper investigates the impact of taxation on the decision of German multinationals to hold or establish a subsidiary in other European countries or abroad. Taking account of unobserved local characteristics as well as firm-specific preferences for potential locations, the results confirm significant effects of tax incentives, market size, and of labor cost on cross-border location decisions. In accordance with Devereux and Griffith (1998) we find that the marginal effective tax rate has no predictive power for location decisions. However, the results indicate a considerably weaker predictive power of the effective average tax rate as compared to the statutory tax rate.