Forschung

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 find that: (i) global offshore wealth remained broadly stable as a fraction of global GDP since 2001, following a sharp increase in the 1980s and 1990s; (ii) the location of offshore wealth changed markedly, with a decline in the share held in Switzerland and a rise of Asian financial centers, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and (iii) a growing fraction comes from developing countries.

joint work with Souleymane Faye, Carolina Moura & Gabriel Zucman

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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. 

joint work with Giulia Aliprandi, Tommaso Faccio, Petr Janský & Katia Toledo Ruiz
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This paper uses confidential firm-level panel data to provide new estimates of corporate profit shifting by German affiliates of multinational corporations. The estimated semielasticity suggests that the profits of German affiliates are highly sensitive to foreign tax rate changes. The semielasticity is higher when at least one investor is located in a tax haven and is not significant when a company has never had a tax-haven investor. Using the tax attractiveness index as an alternative operationalization of the profit-shifting incentive yields similar but less robust results. The estimated effects are used to extrapolate aggregate revenue losses, which range between EUR 1.5 and 5.8 billion in 2016. The results suggest that ownership links to tax havens are an informative indicator of whether or not a company engages in international profit shifting. 

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