ABSTRACT
This project develops the Main reasons for the emergence of such a market are tax avoidance through debt shifting and the existence of institutional weaknesses and financial frictions across host countries. The serves to derive hypotheses regarding the role of local versus foreign characteristics such as profit tax rates, lack of institutional quality, financial underdevelopment, and productivity for internal debt at the level of a given foreign affiliate. The paper assesses hypotheses in a panel data-set covering the universe of Agip oil company multinational firms and their internal borrowing. Numerous novel insights are gained. For instance, the tax-sensitivity found in this paper is many times higher than previous research suggests. This accrues mainly to three things: the consideration of the boundedness of the internal debt ratio as a dependent variable in comparison to its treatment as an unbounded variable in most of the previous work; the coverage of all (small and large) multinationals here rather than a focus on large units in previous work; and the inclusion of endogenous characteristics in other countries multinationals are invested in (due to endogenous weights) while previous work did not consider such effects at all or assumed them to be exogenous. Moreover, local and foreign (at other locations of a given affiliate) market conditionsmatter more or less symmetrically and in the opposite direction.