Taxing Banks Fairly offers an ethical perspective on bank taxation and financial stability to complement the traditional political economy approach. It also considers how a bank levy or financial activities tax, could be used to ensure that big banks m

The financial crisis has prompted a reconsideration of the taxation of financial institutions, with practice outstripping principle: France, Germany, the United Kingdom and several other European countries have now introduced some form of bank tax, and the U.S. administration has revived its own proposal for such a charge. This paper considers the structure, appropriate rate, and revenue yield of corrective taxation of financial institutions addressed to two externalities, consequent on excessive risk-taking, prominent in the crisis: those that arise when such institutions are simply allowed to collapse, and those that arise when, to avoid the harm this would cause, their creditors are bailed out. It also asks whether corrective taxation or a regulatory capital requirement is the better way to address these concerns. The results suggest a potential role for taxing bank borrowing, perhaps as an adjunct to minimum capital requirements, at marginal rates that rise quite sharply at low capital ratios (but are likely lower when the government cannot commit to its bailout policy), reaching levels higher than those of the bank taxes so far adopted or proposed.

This paper explores whether corporate tax bias toward debt finance differs between banks and nonbanks, using a large panel of micro data. On average, it finds that there is no significant difference. The marginal tax effect for both banks and non-banks is close to 0.2. However, the responsiveness differs considerably across the size distribution and the conditional leverage distribution. For nonbanks, we find a U-shaped relationship between asset size and tax responsiveness, although this pattern does not hold universally across the conditional leverage distribution. For banks, in contrast, the tax responsiveness declines linearly in asset size. Quantile regressions show further that capitaltight banks are significantly less responsive than are capital-abundant banks; the same pattern holds for the largest non-banks. Still, even the largest banks with high conditional leverage ratios feature a significant, positive tax response.

This book contains contributions from prominent practitioners and academics presenting their views on the tax levies on the financial sector from a legal and an economic perspective. (New) tax levies on the financial sector have been an ongoing subject of interest since the financial crisis of the past years. In this book, various ways of taxing the financial sector are discussed.

This book analyses the nature of banking, its complex financing transactions and how they are used by both banks and their clients in tax planning. It also explores the processes that banks use to manage tax risk and the prevention, detection and response strategies applied by revenue bodies.

This book provides an overview of the tax treatment of banks’ tax losses losses in 17 OECD countries; describes the tax risks that arise in relation to these losses; outlines the incentives that give rise to these risks, and describes how these risks can be reduced.