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.

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. In this paper, I construct the database for bank CbCR from the banks filings and annual reports. The database includes 51 European banks headquartered in 18 different European countries between 2014 and 2020. I use the database to study profit shifting arising from international tax differences between countries. I find that the banks’ profits are sensitive to the tax rate suggesting that banks lower their tax burden through their affiliates. The size of banks seems to have an effect, the larger the bank group, the more it might engage in tax planning. Profit shifting is estimated by using the tax differential methodology. The findings show that profit shifting by the top European banks is around 4-3% percent of the total profits booked abroad. This implies tax revenue losses of up to 3-2%. The introduction of a global minimum tax of 15% would generate between 300 to 2 billion euros depending on the final rules implemented.