Harry Grubert’s Evolving Views on International Tax Policy

Harry Grubert made important contributions to our thinking about international tax policies. He identified the numerous margins on which corporate tax systems could distort behavior in a global economy and estimated the relative costs of these distortions. His views evolved over time from support of worldwide taxation of U.S. multinationals to favoring a territorial system with a minimum tax on super-normal returns and a shift in taxation from the corporate to the shareholder level. His research greatly influenced corporate reforms in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), although he no doubt would have differed with many of the Act’s details.

This article was originally published by the National Tax Journal in November of 2019.