Michael Devereux (Oxford)
Lilian Faulhaber (Georgetown)
Michelle Hanlon (MIT)
Jim Hines (Michigan)
Wolfgang Schön (Max Planck)
John Vella (Oxford)
What is OMG?
On behalf of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, and Georgetown University Law Center, we are excited to announce the OMG Transatlantic Tax Talks will continue this academic year. (Why OMG? Oxford-Michigan-MIT-Munich-Georgetown.)
This speaker series will be taking place on Zoom. It is an interdisciplinary series, with experts in taxation from law, economics, and accounting presenting their work.
Evelina Gavrilova-Zoutman (NHH Norwegian School of Economics) will present her paper The Big Short (Interest): Closing the Loopholes in the Dividend-Withholding Tax (co-written with Elisa Casi, David Murphy, Floris Zoutman) on Thursday 20 October.
All talks will be on Zoom at 11:00 Eastern time/4:00 UK/5:00 CET. Presenters will speak for about 20 minutes, and the remaining 40 minutes will be used for Q&A.
The Big Short (Interest): Closing the Loopholes in the Dividend-Withholding Tax
Abstract: We study the effect of stricter enforcement of the dividend-withholding tax (DWT). We focus on a 2016 Danish reform and compare Denmark to its Nordic neighbors. Before the reform, all countries have strong spikes in stocks on loan centered around the ex-dividend day, consistent with the most popular DWT arbitrage transactions. Post-reform, the spikes in Denmark disappear. We find that stricter enforcement resulted in approx. 1.3 bln USD in annual DWT revenue (130 % of pre-reform revenue) with no effect on cost of capital and dividend policy. We find similar results in reforms across Europe.
