Vicente, Joana Andrade2021-11-252021-11-252021-11Vicente, Joana Andrade (2021). "Tax us, if you can : a game theoretic approach to profit shifting within the European Union". Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão – REM Working paper series nº 0206/20212184-108Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/22569In this paper we theoretically analyse the European Union’s ongoing political impasse regarding the choice of a single method to allocate multinational enterprises’ profits across countries and we find that this strategic situation resembles a coordination game with distributional consequences. The two Nash equilibria involve no efficiency trade-off (only a movement along the Pareto frontier), but the conflictual distribution of welfare gains and the presence of heterogeneous preferences have been preventing the implementation of a new long-term comprehensive tax policy reform. A unitary taxation approach with formulary apportionment in the European Union is better suited to tackle artificial profit shifting via transfer pricing and would mean an evolutionary change without disrupting the current international tax policy environment. It would restore faith in fairness in the European tax system and allow for further coordination of the transfer pricing policies of the two main international political forces – the United States and the European Union.engbase erosion and profit shiftingCommon Consolidated Corporate Tax Basecoordination gamesEuropean Uniontransfer pricingworking paper