Illicit financial flows (IFFs) threaten countries' ability to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Progressing on the IFFs target is thus crucial, as is the ability to measure achieved progress. In this paper we explore how to best statistically measure tax avoidance by...

Much of the foreign direct investment worldwide is affected by one of more than 3000 bilateral tax treaties. There is an agreement that dividend and interest payments respond to these tax treaties' provisions, but evidence is scarce as to the magnitude of this response. We aim to fill in this...

Effective tax rates (ETRs) estimated from the balance sheet data of multinational corporations (MNCs) are useful for comparing MNCs' corporate income taxation across countries. In this paper we propose a new methodological approach to estimate ETRs as reliably and as for as many countries as...

Governments' revenues are lower when multinational enterprises avoid paying corporate income tax by shifting their profits to tax havens. In this paper, we ask which countries' tax revenues are affected most by this tax avoidance and how much. To estimate the scale of profit shifting, we start...

We exploit the new country-by-country reporting data of multinational corporations, with unparalleled country coverage, to reveal the distributional consequences of profit shifting. We estimate that multinational corporations worldwide shifted over $ 850 billion in profits in 2017, primarily to...

Profit shifting of multinational corporations (MNCs) negatively affects citizens, governments as well as other companies in the European Union. This consensus seems to be emerging in spite of the fact that the phenomenon of profit shifting is unobservable directly and therefore only indirect and...

How much companies pay in corporate income taxes is often better captured by effective tax rates (ETRs) rather than by statutory ones. Economists further distinguish between those modelled using the law - forward-looking ETRs - and those estimated from actual data on companies' profits and taxes...

This paper evaluates the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) recently proposed by the European Commission. We find that if the CCCTB is introduced as it is currently proposed (including loss consolidation), then it is likely to impose large tax revenue costs of about one fifth of the...

We exploit the new multinational corporations' country-by-country reporting datawith unparalleled country coverage to study profit shifting to tax havens. We showthat a logarithmic function is preferable to linear and quadratic ones for modelling the extremely non-linear relationship between...