Offshore tax havens cause large losses of government revenue by facilitating tax evasion by wealthy individuals. This paper focuses on offshore tax evasion in developing countries and documents two empirical regularities. First, there is no clear development gradient in the exposure to offshore...

Do political institutions limit rent-seeking by politicians? To address this question, we study the transformation of petroleum rents into hidden wealth using unique data on bank deposits in tax havens. We find that petroleum rents are associated with increases in hidden wealth, but only when...

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 document that the first leak of customer information from a tax haven bank caused a significant decrease in the market value of Swiss banks known to be assisting with tax evasion and that the decrease was largest for the banks most strongly involved. These findings suggest that markets...

We document that the first leak of customer information from a tax haven bank caused a significant decrease in the market value of Swiss banks known to be assisting with tax evasion and that the decrease was largest for the banks most strongly involved. These findings suggest that markets...