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. However, these reports are scattered across different sets of documents, making collecting and analysing them challenging. Second, CbCR publishing is driven by European companies, especially companies active in the extractive sector. Finally, published reports are generally not complete in terms of variables included but present a satisfactory geographical disaggregation in most cases.
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. Based on this new dataset, we estimate the sensitivity of the location choice of super-rich foreigners to a preferential tax scheme, under which wealthy foreigners are taxed on their expenses, rather than their true income and wealth. We are the first to evaluate this infamous policy (which bears similarities with “non-dom” taxation in the UK or Italy), and show that when some Swiss cantons abolished this practice, their stock of super-rich foreigners dropped by 30% as a consequence. We find no response for the unaffected Swiss super-rich.
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. We apply this proposal to energy companies that are headquartered or have sales in the European Union. We estimate that taxing the January 2022 to September 2022 valuation gains of energy firms at a rate of 33% would generate around €65 billion in revenue (0.3% of GDP) for the European Union. We discuss implementation practicalities and compare our proposals to other plans made to tax excess 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. First, despite substantial offshore tax evasion, declared foreign assets quadrupled. Second, tax progressivity improved because disclosures were extensive among the wealthiest 0.1%. Third, improving tax compliance has sizable fiscal externalities on capital taxes and social transfers: the wealth and capital income tax bases more than doubled, and the earmarked revenue boosted pension benefits by 15%. We end by discussing the lessons from Argentina.
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. 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. We apply this proposal to energy companies that are headquartered or have sales in the European Union. We estimate that taxing the January 2022 to September 2022 valuation gains of energy firms at a rate of 33% would generate around €80 billion in revenue (0.4% of GDP) for the European Union. We discuss implementation practicalities and compare our proposals to other plans made to tax excess profits.