This paper investigates offshore financial centers in the Caribbean from the perspective of offshore economies, onshore economies, and international investors. Using multilateral data on the international positions of banks, we analyze the flow of funds that has been transferred from the major...

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...

This paper develops a competition theory framework that evaluates an important aspect of the OECD's Harmful Tax Practices Initiative against tax havens. We show that the sequential nature of the process is harmful and more costly than a "big bang" multilateral agreement. The sequentiality may...

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....

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...

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 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...

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...

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...