Despite a Sustainable Development Goals target to reduce trade mispricing and other illicit financial flows, it is not clear how to measure trade mispricing over time for countries worldwide. We aim to combine a broad coverage of countries by using UN Comtrade data and robustness by developing a...

Much of the foreign direct investment worldwide is affected by one of more than 3000 bilateral tax treaties. There is an agreement that dividend and interest payments respond to these tax treaties' provisions, but evidence is scarce as to the magnitude of this response. We aim to fill in this...

International corporate tax is an important source of government revenue, especially in lower-income countries. An important recent study of the scale of this problem was carried out by International Monetary Fund researchers Ernesto Crivelli, Ruud De Mooij, and Michael Keen. We first...

In this paper we use the new Government Revenue Dataset to analyse fiscal decentralization. We find that developed countries are on average more decentralized than developing countries and that Asia, Europe and North America are among the most fiscally decentralized regions. In our econometric...

Regional differences in prices levels are substantial in many countries, but little is known about how important they are for income inequality and relative poverty. To bridge this gap, we provide new evidence on the basis of the best available data and a novel two-step approach. First, we...

We exploit the new country-by-country reporting data of multinational corporations, with unparalleled country coverage, to reveal the distributional consequences of profit shifting. We estimate that multinational corporations worldwide shifted over $ 850 billion in profits in 2017, primarily to...

In this paper we use the recently developed Bilateral Financial Secrecy Index to evaluate which countries supply most secrecy to EU Member States. Then, we assess how well-aimed are two of the EU's recent policy efforts to increase financial transparency: automatic Country-by-Country Reporting...

Illicit financial flows (IFFs) threaten countries' ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Progressing on the IFFs target is thus crucial, as is the ability to measure achieved progress. In this paper we explore how to best statistically measure tax avoidance by...

We exploit the new multinational corporations' country-by-country reporting datawith unparalleled country coverage to study profit shifting to tax havens. We showthat a logarithmic function is preferable to linear and quadratic ones for modelling the extremely non-linear relationship between...

Corruption is notoriously hard to measure directly, and cross-country corruption indices thus often rely on indirect information such as country experts' or international businessmen's perceptions. Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is one such indicator that is often...