This article delves into the transition from traditional tax havens to a new generation of digital jurisdictions powered by blockchain technology. It examines how blockchain wallets and decentralized exchanges are redefining financial sovereignty by offering anonymity, asset protection, and...

In recent decades, governments around the world have increasingly used various forms of state aid to try to attract and retain the business activity of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Yet, in most cases, this "commercialisation of state sovereignty" (Palan, 2002) has failed to catalyse...

Purpose - This study aims to understand the investments made by Indian MNCs in different tax havens to optimize their tax liabilities. The study also aims to provide insights into the conceptual framework of such practices, highlighting potential benefits and risks and providing policy...

Tax havens represent the largest financing hub for financial institutions. For banks, they account for more than 20% of all cross-borders banking debt worldwide. Yet, our understanding of the underlying drivers remains limited. Drawing on a unique global dataset covering major international...

Are sanctions bypassed by hiding money offshore? Using bilateral data on bank deposits, we compare how offshore deposits from sanctioned versus non-sanctioned countries develop after the U.S. and the EU impose financial sanctions. Sanctions targeting individuals increase offshore deposits, as...

When capital leaves a country and then flows back as foreign direct investment (FDI), we call it round-tripping FDI. It is widely suspected that China's official FDI statistics contain a substantial amount of round-tripping FDI. However, it is difficult to quantify the round-tripping FDI due to...

This paper presents a comparative empirical analysis of multinational profit shifting using two principal data sources: the OECD Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) statistics and ORBIS firm-level financial data. We begin by systematically examining structural and reporting differences across...

Assessing European financial integration has proved difficult because of complex financial intermediation activities carried out in some European financial centres (Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) whose scale has grown enormously over time. We refer to these three countries as "onshore...

This chapter provides a description of one of the key anti-tax-avoidance rules to combat profit shifting by multinational corporations, so called Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) rules that directly target income in low-tax countries. We explain some key institutional features of CFC...

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 chapter reviews the literature providing empirical estimates on the tax elasticity of multinational profits and discusses the challenges faced when attempting to quantify tax-motivated profit shifting. We first use micro-level data to show that multinational corporations hold a...

Multinational enterprises are increasingly using offshore locations to pay lower taxes on their profits. This behavior has distortive effects on the global economy, as the concentration of multinational activities mirrors global tax patterns. In this paper, I exploit the OECD country-by-country...

Since 2016, Country-by-Country reporting has provided tax authorities with detailed information about multinationals’ worldwide activities. It has been hailed as a game-changer for corporate taxation, enabling tax authorities to target multinational firms with high profits in tax havens. We...

Input-Output tables have become the workhorse data structure when considering global supply chains since, by definition, they measure how production in one countrysector is linked to that in another via trade in intermediate inputs. What traditional input-output tables miss, however, is the role...

The past decade has witnessed a rapid increase in data leaks from tax havens, spanning from the Luxembourg Leaks to revelations in the Panama and Pandora Papers. While these leaks often prompt political investigations into politicians with offshore accounts and calls from civil society for...

This study examines whether the use of tax haven subsidiaries by U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) is associated with more intense use of share buybacks and with improvement in management's ability to generating revenues. I find that MNCs' more intensive tax haven subsidiary use is...

German municipalities levy local business taxes by choosing a tax rate to apply to local business income, where the tax base is defined uniformly at the national level. Before the federal government’s imposition of a minimum tax rate in 2004, some municipalities such as the tiny North Sea town...

Tax havens have become a subject of great interest among policymakers, scholars and the general public, and are central to many important current policy debates. This chapter provides an overview of the scholarly literature on the characteristics and origins of tax havens. The earlier...

We investigate the role of a country's position as a tax haven and its level of corruption in information asymmetry for non-US stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Our results indicate that non-US stocks from countries with more pronounced attributes of tax havens and more corruption...

An international tax haven is usually a low-tax jurisdiction that seeks to attract investment by foreign investors. But, there are many state and local jurisdictions within federal systems that set zero tax rates on personal or corporate income, consumption, property, and wealth in an effort to...

Private Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) is a measure against tax avoidance by large multinationals, implemented throughout the EU in 2016. Multinational companies with an annual revenue over € 750 million have been required to report their global activities on a country-by-country basis to...

Tax havens have become a subject of great interest among policymakers, scholars and the general public, and are central to many important current policy debates. This chapter provides an overview of the scholarly literature on the characteristics and origins of tax havens. The earlier...

An international tax haven is usually a low-tax jurisdiction that seeks to attract investment by foreign investors. But, there are many state and local jurisdictions within federal systems that set zero tax rates on personal or corporate income, consumption, property, and wealth in an effort to...

Due to the growing gap between wealth and poverty, more global attention is paid to the global inequality mechanisms. The polarization of wealth across the world is not a recipe for peace or stability. The rise of rampant economic insecurity is leading to the end of the fragile peace agreements...