Our Publications

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.