This paper uses micro data from country-by-country reporting of more than 3600 large multinational companies operating in 238 jurisdictions to analyze global profit shifting to avoid taxes. These companies report 7% of their global profits in jurisdictions with effective average tax rates below...

How did the rise of multinational enterprises (MNEs) put pressure on the prevailing international corporate tax framework? MNEs, and firms with market power, are not new phenomena, nor is the corporate income tax, which dates to the early 20th century. This prompts the question, what is...

International corporate tax avoidance by multinational enterprises likely lowers the Czech Republic's corporate income tax revenue, but it is not clear by how much. To clarify this I first review existing estimates of the costs of international corporate tax avoidance to government revenue...

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 investigate multinational firms' activities in tax havens and regulatory efforts to curb these activities in three steps. First, we discuss the evolution of information exchange and disclosure regimes among tax authorities, with a focus on the recent Countryby-Country (CbC) reporting regimes,...

We exploit one of the largest data leaks to date to study whether and how firms use secret offshore vehicles. From the leaked data, we identify 338 listed firms as users of secret offshore vehicles and document that these vehicles are used to finance corruption, avoid taxes, and expropriate...

This Article documents a process in which a national tax administration in one jurisdiction, is consciously and systematically assisting taxpayers to avoid taxes in other jurisdictions. The aiding tax administration collects a small amount tax from the aided taxpayers. Such tax is functionally...

The Unified Approach issued by the OECD Secretariat on Oct 9, 2019, is the OECD's most recent attempt to find international consensus on BEPS Action Item 1, “Taxing the Digital Economy.” Our assessment is that the Pillar One proposals in the Unified Approach suffer from several defects, the...

Income taxes are a major expense for profitable corporations, oftentimes 25 percent or more of pretax income. This study exploits a setting – the market for corporate control – to test competing agency-based and risk-based explanations of corporate tax planning. Exploiting the staggered...

We analyze how multinational firms reallocate real operations and debt across their affiliates in response to anti-tax avoidance policies. The UK introduced a worldwide debt cap in 2010, generating a quasi-natural experiment that limited interest deductibility for a group of multinational firms....