The Deterrence Effect of Whistleblowing An Event Study of Leaked Customer Information from Banks in Tax Havens

We document that the first leak of customer information from a tax haven bank caused a sudden flight of deposits from tax havens and a sharp decrease in the market value of banks known to be assisting with tax evasion. The loss of market value was largest for the banks most strongly involved in tax evasion and zero for banks with no known ties to tax evasion. Subsequent leaks had qualitatively similar although smaller effects. Our findings suggest that whistleblowing in tax haven banks deters offshore tax evaders by increasing the perceived risk of committing and assisting with tax evasion

Dirty Money Coming Home: Capital Flows into and Out of Tax Havens

We use recently released bilateral locational banking statistics of the BIS to show the full circle of international tax evasion via tax havens. White-washed money from tax havens is withdrawn from banks in non-havens if an information treaty is signed. This complements the stylized fact of such a reaction on outbound flows into tax havens. We find different time lags and other plausible structures in these reactions and a puzzling decline of the effect of treaties on capital flows over time

Territorial Tax Reform and Profit Shifting by US and Japanese Multinationals

In 2009, Japan began to exempt dividends paid by Japanese-owned foreign subsidiaries to their parent firms from home-country taxation. This tax reform switched Japan's corporate tax system to a territorial tax system that exempts foreign income from home-country taxation. In this paper, I examine the impact of the territorial tax reform on the profit-shifting behavior of Japanese multinationals. I analyze the change in the sensitivity of the reported profits of Japanese-owned foreign subsidiaries to host countries' corporate income tax rates after the tax reform, using US-owned foreign subsidiaries as a comparison group. I find that, on average, the profits of US-owned foreign subsidiaries are more sensitive to host countries' tax rates than are those of Japanese-owned foreign subsidiaries over the whole study period from 2004 to 2016 and over the subperiod from 2004 to 2007, when both countries used the worldwide tax system. However, the sensitivity of the pre-tax profits of Japanese-owned foreign subsidiaries, particularly large subsidiaries, to host countries' corporate tax rates significantly increased in response to the announcement of the territorial tax regime in 2008, relative to that of the US-owned foreign subsidiaries. This suggests that the introduction of the territorial tax system facilitated profit shifting by Japanese multinationals