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Publications (22)
Working Paper
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Cross-border traders face a choice between official and unofficial border crossings. The latter allow them to evade taxes, but expose them to other risks, such as bribes, fines, and arrest. We investigate the perceptions of cross-border traders about the risks of trading officially vs unofficially...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
In an environment with extensive corruption where much of the population evades paying their full taxes due, we tackle the question of optimal taxation when constituencies with conflicting objectives (the poor and the rich) push tax policy in different directions. We think in terms of a government...
– Four pieces of advice for policymakers
From profit shifting to sanction evasion, illicit financial flows divert funds away from essential poverty-fighting and infrastructure programs. A growing body of research provides essential insights for policymakers on how to tackle this key development challenge.Illicit financial flows (IFFs) are...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– A review of methods and evidence
Illicit financial flows (IFFs) constitute a major challenge for development in low-income countries, as domestic resource mobilization is imperative for providing crucial public services. This study focuses exclusively on the economic dimension of IFFs, thereby excluding topics as drugs trade, money...
Blog
– The annual profits multinational corporations shift to tax havens continues to climb and climb
About a decade ago, the world’s biggest economies agreed to crack down on multinational corporations’ abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a 15-point action plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a large chunk of corporate profits from tax authorities.But, according to our estimates...
The importance of domestic revenue mobilization and taxation for sustainable development is widely acknowledged in global development discussions, but for real change to happen the amounts of development aid and political engagement need to live up to commitments.Key factors of development...
Working Paper
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This paper examines how trade sanctions affect the allocation of workers across formal and informal employment. We analyse the case of the unexpected and unprecedented trade sanctions imposed on Iran in 2012. We use a difference-in-differences approach and compare the probability of working in the...
Working Paper
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The United Kingdom’s (UK) property markets are thought to be a common destination for corrupt and criminal assets and money laundering, with investment often through offshore shell companies. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we study the impact of the introduction of a policy in...
The world has been trying to curb profit shifting to tax havens for a decade, but consistent time series evaluating the impact of these reforms have been largely absent. This column uses a new time series of global profit shifting covering the 1975–19 period to estimate that the fraction of...
Working Paper
pdf
In an environment with extensive corruption where much of the population evades paying their full taxes due, we tackle the question of optimal taxation when constituencies with opposing objectives (the poor and the rich) push tax policy in different directions. We think in terms of a government...
Working Paper
pdf
We study whether misinvoicing in international trade is reflected in cross-border bank accounts as reported by offshore financial centres. We show that residents hold more offshore wealth when local misinvoicing practices thrive, especially for under-invoiced exports of natural resources. These...
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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We study the short-term effect of the introduction of the mandatory disclosure programme for aggressive tax arrangements by focusing on the one introduced in May 2018 under Council Directive 2018/288/EU (or DAC6). Employing bilateral data on cross-border deposits, we study the effect of this new...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Argentina’s tax amnesties
This paper studies the effectiveness of tax amnesties and their impacts on capital taxation and public spending. We leverage rich policy variation from Argentina, where left- and right-wing governments implemented multiple programmes and achieved varying success. After numerous failed enforcement...
Working Paper
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– The role of internal debt
Illicit financial flows directly impact a country’s ability to raise, retain, and mobilize its own resources to finance sustainable development. Against a backdrop of a weak public financial position attributed to capital flight, tax avoidance, and dependence on corporate income taxes, governments...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from transaction-level data in Nigeria
Research on profit shifting by multinational corporations in developing countries is limited due to a lack of data. In this paper we use, for the first time, novel administrative data on the transactions of multinational corporations operating in Nigeria vis-à-vis related parties in other...
Displaying 16 of 22 results