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...

In a sample of 7,209 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) incidents involving 63 incident countries and more than 6,000 firms, we show that abnormal event returns are negative (-0.6%) on average but less so when incidents occur abroad rather than at home. This domestic-foreign return gap...

We investigate shareholders' reactions to the increased transparency of corporate tax haven activities in a hand-collected subsidiary data set covering 17,331 publicly listed firms in 52 countries. An increase in transparency through the staggered signing of bilateral tax information exchange...

We exploit a tightening of anti-money laundering (AML) enforcement that imposed disproportionate costs on small banks to examine the effects of a change in bank composition towards larger banks on real economic outcomes. In response to intensified AML enforcement at the end of 2012, counties...

Data leaks create what is otherwise least associated with tax havens: transparency. Tax haven data leaks have occurred repeatedly and with increasing frequency since 2013, raising a natural question: What can we learn from data leaks about tax havens? In this chapter, we provide a practical...

This paper explores whether increasing fossil fuel divestment commitments are related to thereduction of capital flows into the oil & gas sector, based on an analysis of syndicated lending, equity and bond underwriting across 33 countries from 2000 to 2015. We find that increasing oil & gas...

Using a global dataset of over 840,000 equity, bond and syndicated loan investment banking deals, we build the fossil fuel investment brokerage profile of financial centres worldwide between 2000 and 2018. We also study whether city-level fossil fuel divestment commitments and country level...