M. (Masoud) Mohebbi

Taxes serve three main purposes: 1) Generate revenue for governments to fund their expenditures, 2) redistribute wealth within societies, and 3) steer behavior. Taxes are of great economic significance to companies as they constitute a major cash outflow and affect group structures of multinationals. But taxation not only influences business decisions. It also affects the political agenda of many countries facing questions such as how to combat tax avoidance and tax the digital economy. Moreover, governments increasingly use taxes to put a price on pollution addressing societal challenges such as climate change. Because of such developments, businesses are more and more affected by tighter regulations requiring them to provide extensive documentation. Thus, tax compliance has become almost as important as setting up tax-efficient group structures.

Given taxation’s broad objectives and implications, research in taxation covers a wide area of topics, ranging from tax avoidance to tax compliance, from investment decisions to locational decisions, and from tax enforcement to environmental enforcement. All these topics are at the core of companies’ decision making due to their large economic consequences. In this Ph.D. project, you can choose to investigate the role of taxation in one or more of the following areas: (i) investment, financing, or locational decisions of companies (especially in the light of new OECD and EU regulation), (ii) tax enforcement and digitalization of taxation, or (iii) the impact of environmental taxes on business decisions (e.g., CO2 emission certificates).