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...

This paper documents that tax havens play a prominent role in international service trade and investigates the nature of this role. We employ a firm-level dataset with detailed information about service trade and foreign affiliates for virtually all multinational firms in Germany, which allows...

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...

This paper attempts to estimate the size and distribution of tax evasion in rich countries. We combine random audits - the key source used to study tax evasion so far- with new micro-data leaked from large offshore financial institutions - HSBC Switzerland ("Swiss leaks") and Mossack Fonseca...

Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity - from a few percent of...

Ownership of real estate through corporations in offshore tax havens creates opportunities for tax evasion and money laundering and may have undesirable effects in housing markets. In this paper, we study offshore ownership of real estate in the United Kingdom by combining several data sources:...

We document that the first leak of customer information from a tax haven bank caused a sudden flight of deposits from tax havens and a sharp decrease in the market value of banks known to be assisting with tax evasion. The loss of market value was largest for the banks most strongly involved in...

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...

Bank deposits in jurisdictions with banking secrecy constitute an effective tool to evade taxes on interest income. A recent EU reform reduces the scope for this type of tax evasion by introducing a source tax on interest income earned by EU residents in Switzerland and several other...

We use a global dataset with information on 210,000 corporations in 102 countries to investigate whether cross-border profit shifting by multinational firms is more prevalent in less developed countries. We propose a novel technique to study aggressive profit shifting and improve the credibility...