Tax treaties worldwide: Estimating elasticities and revenue foregone

Abstract

Abstract While researchers agree that dividend and interest payments respond to tax treaties, evidence of the magnitude of this response remains scarce. We combine data from the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation and the International Monetary Fund in a set of 65,000 annual country‐pair observations for the 2009–2016 period. We estimate dividend flows to be highly elastic in a cross‐country regression and arrive at somewhat lower and less robust estimates for interest income. While our revenue estimates are lower than static estimates which do not reflect elasticities, we show that for some countries the revenue foregone remains non‐negligible.