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. In this paper, we conduct a benchmark analysis focusing on publicly available CbCRs to assess the reliability of CbCR information compared to respective consolidated financial information. Our findings suggest only limited double counting issues. Most CbCR information matches well with the consolidated information, with only a few exceptions. Nonetheless, we document differences in the definition of variables and in the scope of the reports that may complicate comparisons across multinational corporations. We subsequently discuss the implications of our findings for the use of CbCRs as a source of information in economic analyses. In addition, we provide recommendations for improving the reliability and comparability of CbCR information.

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. CTA increased more among the largest firms, which has reinforced their dominant position. A quantitative exercise reveals that the strength of CTA in shaping changes in the distribution of sales varies across industries. In industries like computers or chemicals, CTA can explain up to 10%-30% of the increase in concentration from 1994 to 2017. Further analysis shows the impact.

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. We use firm-level cross-country data to show that affiliates belonging to more complex MNEs are more likely to report zero profit, which is consistent with complexity enabling tax avoidance by multinationals. Our results underline that only the more complex MNEs shift profits away from their high-tax affiliates, while MNEs with flat ownership structures do not display such pattern.

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. In most countries, effective tax rates fall for the largest firms due to the take-up of tax incentives. As a result, a third of the top 1 percent of firms face effective tax rates below the global minimum tax of 15 percent. The minimum tax could raise corporate tax revenue by 27 percent in the median sample country.

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. Combining this with variation in cantonal wealth taxes, we then estimate an event study model to identify the dynamic effects of reforms to top wealth tax rates on the subsequent evolution of wealth concentration. Our results imply that a reduction in the top marginal wealth tax rate by 0.1 percentage points increases the top 1% (0.1%) wealth share by 0.9 (1.2) percentage points five years after the reform. This suggests that wealth tax cuts over the last 50 years explain roughly 18% (25%) of the increase in wealth concentration among the top 1% (0.1%).

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. To establish causality, we use German municipal data and analyse how changes in municipal trade tax rates levied on corporate profits affect local tax revenue structure. Following a trade tax rate increase, we find that municipalities with high exposure to aggressive multinationals experience a significant decline in trade tax revenue levels and shares.

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. In terms of data quality, we find that the inclusion of intra company dividends and equity-accounted profits are a minor concern on average but that for individual MNEs corrections might be substantial. Our sample MNEs seem to pay higher effective tax rates than the global average and many of them report relatively little profit in tax havens. We only find a very weak correlation of the location of profits and effective tax rates. This might indicate that more tax transparent MNEs avoid taxes less aggressively. However, our assessment of different tax risk indicators reveals important variations between companies. 

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. Overall, 2 percent of Norwegian real estate assets were foreign-owned in 2017, while this share amounts to 10 percent for assets owned by Norwegian corporations. Foreign ownership has increased over the last decade, and ownership from tax havens even more rapidly. Ownership from neighbouring countries and Luxembourg is especially large.

This 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. We extend our time series back to 1975 and document a remarkable increase of multinational profits and global profit shifting from 1975 to 2019.