This paper analyzes the tax haven investment behavior of multinational firms from a country that exempts foreign income from taxation. High foreign tax rates generally encourage firms to invest in tax havens, though significant costs of reallocating taxable income dampen these incentives. The...

In this paper we analyze the link between corruption money laundering and round-trip investment via offshore jurisdictions utilizing Russian firm-level data. In particular we empirically explore location strategies of round-trip investors (namely, from Cyprus and British Virgin Islands) across...

Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their nationality in aggregate statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities with their issuer's ultimate parent and restate bilateral investment positions to better...

Eliminating firms' access to tax havens can have unintended consequences for their domestic economic activity. We study a policy that limited profit shifting by US multinationals and show it raised the tax cost of domestic investment. Firms affected by the policy responded by reducing investment...

In 2008, the IRS initiated efforts to curb the use of offshore accounts to evade taxes. This paper uses administrative microdata to examine the impact of the enforcement efforts on taxpayers' reporting of offshore accounts and income. Enforcement caused approximately 60,000 individuals to...

We develop a tax competition framework in which some jurisdictions, called tax havens, are parasitic on the revenues of other countries. The havens use real resources to help companies camouflage their home-country tax avoidance, and countries use resources in an attempt to limit the transfer of...

Beginning in 2004, official statistics display a slowdown in U.S. productivity growth. We show how offshore profit shifting by U.S. multinational enterprises affects GDP and, thus, productivity measurement. Profit shifting increased in the mid- 1990s, resulting in lower measured productivity...

Why do some firms adopt certain tax havens and how sensitive is the demand for tax havens? We address these questions by studying how the repeal of Section 936 tax credits affected firms with affiliates in Puerto Rico. We first describe the characteristics of US multinationals that were exposed...

This paper analyzes the factors influencing whether countries become tax havens. Roughly 15 percent of countries are tax havens; as has been widely observed, these countries tend to be small and affluent. This paper documents another robust empirical regularity: better-governed countries are...