Our Publications

The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act lowered the US corporate tax rate and introduced provisions to curb profit shifting. We combine survey data, tax data, and firm financial statements to study the evolution of the geographical allocation of US firms’ profits after the reform.

This paper constructs homogeneous time series of global household offshore wealth covering the 2001–2023 period, during which major international efforts were implemented to curb offshore tax evasion.

We study post-Apartheid inequality dynamics in South Africa using a new microdatabase that combines survey, tax, national accounts, and budget data from 1993 to 2019. Until 2005, pretax inequality rose, racial disparities widened, and redistribution stagnated.

This paper quantifies how profit shifting erodes workers’ earnings by reducing profit-sharing payouts in French multinational firms. We leverage newly available administrative microdata on the global activity of multinational firms linked to employer-employee data to build a credible counterfactual of profits and profit-sharing absent profit shifting.

We use population-wide administrative micro-data to provide new estimates of income inequality and effective tax rates by income groups in Brazil, capturing all income and all tax payments. Our data allow us to link businesses to their owners and thus to allocate business income and associated taxes to the corresponding individual firm owners.

This paper examines how the choice between book profits and taxable income affects profit shifting estimation. Using administrative tax data from France (2014-2022) covering the universe of firms with matched tax returns and financial statements, we document substantial book-tax differences, with book profits exceeding taxable income by a factor of 3 to 4.

Over the past decade, more than 100 jurisdictions have signed automatic exchange of financial information agreements (AEoI) in an effort to fight cross-border tax evasion. This paper studies the effectiveness and coverage of these agreements using account data leaked from an Isle of Man bank with a large customer base in countries participating to AEoI.

This report examines the evolution of harmful corporate tax practices in recent years, as well as the development of blacklists intended to identify such practices. First, it shows that harmful tax practices are no longer confined to easily identifiable jurisdictions known for aggressive tax policies. Second, it finds that current blacklists—although they may be linked to potentially effective sanctions—are generally too limited in scope to produce significant economic effects. Finally, the report proposes enhanced criteria for constructing blacklists of harmful tax regimes. In particular, it argues that introducing a quantitative criterion based on effective tax rates is essential to account for the recent evolution of harmful tax competition.

This policy note highlights the main conclusions of the Working Paper entitled “Declining Tax Rates of Multinationals: The Hidden Role of Tax Base Reforms” (2025) by EU Tax Observatory researchers Sarah Godar and Jules Ducept.

Cryptocurrencies pose substantial challenges to tax enforcement due to their anonymous and decentralized properties, undermining conventional regulatory practices. We study the impact of an ambitious new enforcement initiative aimed at addressing these challenges: domestic third-party reporting of crypto income.

In the second half of the 2010s more than 100 countries — including all large offshore financial centers — started to automatically exchange bank information with foreign tax authorities. This informational big-bang marks a break with the situation of offshore bank secrecy that prevailed before.

This note examines the global prevalence and distribution of shell companies, which are often used for illicit financial activities like tax evasion. Using business registry data for over 200 jurisdictions, including individual US states, we construct an indicator of shell company prevalence based on the number of registered companies per capita.

Using a quasi-experimental setting, we document that corporations decrease declared profits and corporate income taxes in response to an increase in the VAT rate. In an attempt to raise tax revenue during the Greek economic crisis, a 16% VAT rate, which existed for historicopolitical reasons in Greek islands, was harmonised to the national 24% rate.

Over the last 10 years, governments have launched major initiatives to reduce international tax evasion. Yet despite the importance of these developments, little is known about the effects of these new policies. Is global tax evasion falling or rising? Are new issues emerging, and if so, what are they? This report addresses these questions thanks to an unprecedented international research collaboration building on the work of more than 100 researchers globally.

This paper studies how the introduction of multilateral automatic exchange of information (AEOI) in 2017 affects tax compliance. Exploiting rich tax data, variation generated by the interplay of the Swiss tax amnesty with the AEOI, and difference-in-differences designs, I document substantial compliance responses.

Country-by-Country Reports (CbCRs) have emerged as a unique public source of information to track the country-by-country activities of multinational corporations. However, concerns about double counting and comparability have raised questions about the reliability of these reports for economic analyses.

This paper investigates the influence of corporate tax avoidance (CTA) on firm-level sales, and its aggregate implications. CTA gives a competitive advantage to avoiding firms, which affects the distribution of sales in the economy. We find a causal impact of CTA on sales in US firm-level data.

Does the complexity of the ownership structure of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) enable tax avoidance? We characterize as complex an MNE’s ownership structure in which the headquarter owns its subsidiaries through a chain of intermediaries and we build a measure defined as the mean number of layers between affiliates and the headquarter.

This paper provides novel evidence on the relationship between firm size and effective corporate tax rates using full-population administrative tax data from 13 countries. In all countries, small firms face lower effective tax rates than mid-sized firms due to reduced statutory tax rates and a higher propensity to register losses.

Like in many other countries, wealth inequality has increased in Switzerland over the last fifty years. By providing new evidence on cantonal top wealth shares for each of the 26 cantons since 1969, we show that the overall trend masks striking differences across cantons, both in levels and trends.

Country-by-Country Reporting is a key data source for understanding the activities of multinational firms. This note explores public Country-by-Country Reports (CbCRs) published by multinational companies to highlight several important trends. First, while only a small number of large multinationals currently publish their CbCRs, the number of companies is increasing rapidly for both large and smaller multinational firms.

We study the consequences of multinational tax avoidance on the structure of government tax revenues. To motivate our analysis, we show that countries with high revenue losses due to pro t shifting have lower corporate tax revenues and rates and higher indirect tax revenues and rates.

We collect, digitize, and supplement Swiss rich lists published in the “BILANZ” business magazine since 1989, to gain new insights on the structure and dynamics of top wealth in Switzerland. We show that 60% of the super-rich are heirs—a fraction twice as large as in the US, where many super-rich are self-made—and that half of the super-rich residing in Switzerland are foreign-born.

In this paper, we analyse a sample of voluntarily published country-by-country reports (CbCRs) of 35 multinational enterprises (MNEs). We assess the value added and the limitations of qualitative and quantitative information provided in the reports based on a comparison to individual MNEs’ annual financial reports and aggregate CbCR data provided by the OECD.

This paper is the first to estimate the full extent of foreign-owned commercial and residential real estate in a country, including both direct and indirect ownership. We utilise unique Norwegian administrative data with reliable market value estimates and country-level ownership information.

his paper constructs time series of global profit shifting covering the 2015–19 period, during which major international efforts were implemented to curb profit shifting. We find that (i) multinational profits grew faster than global profits, (ii) the share of multinational profits booked in tax havens remained constant at around 37 per cent, and (iii) the fraction of global corporate tax revenue lost due to profit shifting rose from 9 to 10 per cent.

This note presents a new way to tax excess profits. We propose to tax the rise in the stock market capitalization of companies that benefit from extraordinary circumstances, such as energy firms following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Targeting the rise in stock market capitalization (which is easily observable) makes the tax much harder to avoid than standard excess profit taxes, and allows to capture rents irrespective of where multinational companies book their profits.

The paper studies the effectiveness of tax amnesties and their impacts on capital taxation and public spending. We leverage rich policy variation from Argentina, which implemented the world’s most successful program, reportedly revealing assets worth 21% of GDP.

This paper presents a new way to tax excess profits. We propose to tax the rise in the stock market capitalization of companies that benefit from extraordinary circumstances, such as energy firms following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

This paper provides evidence of the growing importance of real estate assets in offshore portfolios. We study the implementation of the first multilateral automatic exchange of information norm, the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), which introduces cross-border reporting requirements for financial assets but not for real estate assets.

The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act reduced the US corporate tax rate and introduced provisions to curb profit shifting. We combine survey data, tax data, and firm financial statements to study the evolution of the geographical allocation of US firms’ profits after the reform.

This paper explores profit shifting behaviour by European banks through a newly available data source. Financial institutions as of 2014 started disclosing their activity on a country-by-country level following the CRDIV EU Directive. The country-by-country reporting (CbCR) requires European banks to file their revenues, profits, number of employees and taxes paid in all countries where they operate including tax haven countries.

We use novel leaked microdata to study offshore real estate in Dubai, a fast-growing tax haven. We find that the non-resident ownership share of residential real estate grew from nearly zero in 2005 to 30% ($68 billion) in 2019, a share much larger than other large global cities.

This note provides data on wealth inequality in Russia and advocates for a European Asset Registry. Russia exhibits the highest wealth inequality in Europe. Further, Russia’s wealthiest nationals conceal a large share of their wealth through tax havens. The current architecture of the global financial system impedes comprehensive knowledge on beneficial ownership across asset types and jurisdictions.

This report provides an empirical analysis of tax competition between individuals and firms in the European Union. We find that tax competition increasingly takes the form of preferential or narrowly targeted tax regimes in addition to general rate reductions. We provide a ranking of the most harmful regimes targeting foreigners, primarily high-income or high-wealth individuals. We also discuss several options for dealing with these trends.

This report documents the activity of European banks in tax havens and how this activity has evolved since 2014. The analysis covers 36 systemic European banks that have been required to publicly report country-by-country data on their activities since 2014. We study the level and evolution of the profits booked by these banks in tax havens over the 2014-2020 period. We also compute their effective tax rates and their tax deficit—defined as the difference between what these banks currently pay in taxes and what they would pay if they were subject to a minimum effective tax rate in each country.

This report estimates the amount of tax revenue that the EU could raise by imposing a minimum tax on the profits of multinational companies.