For reference: I'm revisiting the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which was supposed to induce corporations to bring back the money they had invested overseas. For a few quarters it looked as if something was happening: 1/ 
On paper, overseas subsidiaries of U.S. corporations were disinvesting and sending funds back to their parent companies via dividends. But there was no real investment surge here 2/
What was really happening was almost surely just a rejiggering of the accounting. A large part of reported US investment abroad is just an accounting fiction, resulting from profit-shifting into tax havens 3/
A cut in the US tax rate induced corporations to unwind a bit of that profit-shifting, causing a brief dip in reported investment abroad and a brief surge in repatriated profits. 4/
But basically nothing real happened. It was all accounting fictions 5/
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