This concise book gives a unique overview of bank taxation as an alternative or a compliment to prudential regulation or non-revenue taxation. Existing bank taxation is reviewed with a view to eliminating distortions in the tax system, which have incen

The Prudential Regulation of Banks applies modern economic theory to prudential regulation of financial intermediaries. Dewatripont and Tirole tackle the key problem of providing the right incentives to management in banks by looking at how external intervention by claimholders (holders of equity or debt) affects managerial incentives and how that intervention might ideally be implemented. Their primary focus is the regulation of commercial banks and S&Ls, but many of the implications of their theory are also valid for other intermediaries such as insurance companies, pension funds, and securities funds. Observing that the main concern of the regulation of intermediaries is solvency (the relation between equity, debt, and asset riskiness), the authors provide institutional background and develop a case for regulation as performing the monitoring functions (screening, auditing, convenant writing, and intervention) that dispersed depositors are unable or unwilling to perform. They also illustrate the dangers of regulatory failure in a summary of the S&L crisis of the 1980s. Following a survey of banking theory, Dewatripont and Tirole develop their model of the capital structure of banks and show how optimal regulation can be achieved using capital adequacy requirements and external intervention when banks are violated. They explain how regulation can be designed to minimize risks of accounting manipulations and to insulate bank managers from macroeconomic shocks, which are beyond their control. Finally, they provide a detailed evaluation of the existing regulation and of potential alternatives, such as rating agencies, private deposit insurance, and large private depositors. They show that these reforms are, at best, a complement, rather than a substitute, to the existing regulation which combines capital ratios with external intervention in case of insolvency. The Prudential Regulation of Banks is part of the Walras Pareto Lectures, from the Universiy of Lausanne.

This publication contains the following four parts: A model Competent Authority Agreement (CAA) for the automatic exchange of CRS information; the Common Reporting Standard; the Commentaries on the CAA and the CRS; and the CRS XML Schema User Guide.

"The global economic and financial crisis has created important needs for fiscal consolidation. This document analyses potential instruments to raise additional tax revenues from the financial sector. The first section reviews the current policy objectives related to the taxation of the financial sector. The second section sheds some light on the current tax treatment of the financial sector. The third section discusses potential tax instruments to reach the goals. The fourth and fifth section respectively assess the advantages and drawbacks of a Financial Transaction Tax and a Financial Activities Tax."--Editor.

This paper presents a model of a multinational firm''s optimal debt policy that incorporates international taxation factors. The model yields the prediction that a multinational firm''s indebtedness in a country depends on a weighted average of national tax rates and differences between national and foreign tax rates. These differences matter because multinationals have an incentive to shift debt to high-tax countries. The predictions of the model are tested using a novel firm-level dataset for European multinationals and their subsidiaries, combined with newly collected data on the international tax treatment of dividend and interest streams. Our empirical results show that corporate debt policy indeed not only reflects domestic corporate tax rates but also differences in international tax systems. These findings contribute to our understanding of how corporate debt policy is set in an international context.

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience interested in economic policy issues. This Web-only series replaced Staff Position Notes in January 2011.

The turmoil in financial markets that resulted from the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States indicates the need to dramatically transform regulation and supervision of financial institutions. Would these institutions have been sounder if the 2004 Revised Framework on International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards (Basel II accord)—negotiated between 1999 and 2004—had already been fully implemented? Basel II represents a dramatic change in capital regulation of large banks in the countries represented on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: Its internal ratings–based approaches to capital regulation will allow large banks to use their own credit risk models to set minimum capital requirements. The Basel Committee itself implicitly acknowledged in spring 2008 that the revised framework would not have been adequate to contain the risks exposed by the subprime crisis and needed strengthening. This crisis has highlighted two more basic questions about Basel II: One, is the method of capital regulation incorporated in the revised framework fundamentally misguided? Two, even if the basic Basel II approach has promise as a paradigm for domestic regulation, is the effort at extensive international harmonization of capital rules and supervisory practice useful and appropriate? This book provides the answers. It evaluates Basel II as a bank regulatory paradigm and as an international arrangement, considers some possible alternatives, and recommends significant changes in the arrangement.