Dirk Schindler appointed at chair of International Taxation

Research in International Taxation traditionally focuses on corporate/business taxation, international factor movements, and firm behavior. The main research strands usually follow the waves of globalisation and political developments. Since the mid-80s, an important topic is the analysis of governments’ policies to attract foreign direct investment from other countries (i.e., tax competition). This mirrors the sharp decrease in corporate tax rates in Europe and the OECD countries. In the last decade, the dominant issue became international corporate tax avoidance, i.e., multinationals, their shifting of paper profits to tax havens, and potential regulatory tools for governments. That research follows up on concerns about massive revenue losses among G20 countries and the OECD initiative to curb base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), leading to the OECD BEPS Action plan.

Within the field of public economics, Professor Dirk Schindler’s research contributes to this area. He expects that profit shifting will remain a dominant topic for the next years. Furthermore, the digitalisation of the economy and the challenges this raises for tax authorities are topical issues that also overlap with profit shifting. One of the pressing questions is how corporate tax systems need to be designed in order to cope with business that gets more and more intangible in nature, profits that hardly can be apportioned to specific affiliates, and tax bases that become even more mobile. The reform options range from additional regulation that preserves the current tax system by and large to drastic system changes that transform the corporate tax rather into a consumption tax. All these options require first further improved understanding of multinationals’ behavior and their responses to public regulation, and then rigorous evaluation in welfare-economics models.

About Dirk Schindler

Dirk Schindler completed his doctoral studies in 2004 and earned his Habilitation in 2010 at the University of Konstanz. In 2012, he joined the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) and hold a Full Professorship in Taxation and Accounting there since 2017. Schindler’s recent research focuses on corporate taxation, in particular on issues of international taxation and tax avoidance. In addition, he is an expert on optimal taxation and risk. He won the Schiesser-Allweiler-Award for the Best PhD-Dissertation at the University of Konstanz in 2006 and is a research fellow at the Norwegian Center for Taxation (NoCeT) at NHH and at the CESifo network in Munich.