Winner-Takes-All: Corporate Tax Erosion and Wealth Concentration in the United States

Corporate tax avoidance is conventionally analysed as a fiscal problem.We argue it is better understood as a pre-distributional mechanism through which r>g compounds at the top of advanced capitalist democracies, converting concentrated corporate profit into concentrated personal wealth. The strategies that depress effective tax rates on the largest American corporations require legal-accounting power available only to multinationals whose assets are mobile across jurisdictions. The result is lightly taxed profits at the top, held disproportionately by the wealthiest, which compound into extreme personal wealth. Using Orbis and Compustat data on US corporate groups from 2001 to 2024, we show that the top 0.1 per cent of US corporate groups now capture 30 per cent of after-tax profits, and the top 1 per cent capture 60 per cent. The richest corporations also pay the least tax. The structural advantage of these IP-rich multinationals has been preserved across the major global policy reforms.