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...

Curtailing tax evasion is high on the international policy agenda. Still, there is only little empirical evidence about the effects of offshore tax evasion in cross-border portfolio investment and its responsiveness to changes in enforcement. Exploiting rich IMF data on bilateral investments in...

Taxpayers who hide assets abroad to evade taxes present a serious enforcement challenge for the United States. In response, the United States has developed a family of initiatives that punish and rehabilitate non-compliant taxpayers, raise revenues, and require widespread reporting of offshore...

Illicit financial flows (IFFs) constitute a major challenge for development in the Global South, as domestic resource mobilization is imperative for providing crucial public services. While several methods offer to measure the extent of IFFs, each has its benefits and drawbacks. Critically,...

We investigate profit shifting by the largest and systemically relevant European multinational banks using new data made available through country-by-country reporting for the financial years 2014-2016. We capture tax incentives for income shifting using a multilateral tax differential between...

In 1998 the OECD launched one of the most comprehensive initiatives ever to combat harmful tax competition. The following paper analyzes how companies' investment activities in tax havens are associated with the three most salient elements of the OECD initiative. Our analysis is based on a U.S....

Multinational enterprises make use of tax havens to avoid paying corporate income taxes and this costs hundreds billion USD in lost government revenue worldwide according to an increasing number of recent studies. None of those studies assigns these costs to industries. I aim to shed more light...

While financial secrecy has recently risen on the agenda of policy makers and scholars alike, much remains unknown about its development since the global financial crisis. To show how financial secrecy evolved over time on average, by category, and across countries, we combine the five Financial...

Following numerous high-profile international initiatives, tax haven jurisdictions have been nudged into agreeing on tax information exchange. We analyse whether these agreements had measurable effects on the economy of cooperative tax havens. As GDP data are missing for many small tax haven...

The purpose of this study is to identify the major determinants of tax havens in the actual economic context. The development of tax havens was favored by some factors at macroeconomic level, but also by tax noncompliance behavior of individuals who are seeking different ways to avoid taxation....