Offshore Financial Havens: Their Role in International Capital Flows

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of offshore financial havens in international capital flows. We examine the effects of being a tax haven, a money laundering centre or an offshore financial centre (OFC), which often overlap. We want to see whether these places are used as entrepots (which means temporary storage for funds) or as investment places or both. We mainly use two complementary data sets: bilateral cross-border asset holding and financial intermediation. One is a stock variable and the other one is a flow variable. We apply the gravity model to bilateral cross-border asset holding between 223 host countries and 67 source countries from Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS). We find that tax havens and OFCs attract more asset investment while money laundering centers scare potential investors away. We then use the flow variable of financial intermediation from UNdatabase and find value of financial intermediation is higher in OFCs and lower in money laundering centers. There is no significant relationship between tax haven and financial intermediation. Our results show that the role of offshore havens in facilitating illegal activities like tax evasion and money laundering is overstated in the previous studies. By allowing parameter shifting in the model, we also find the competitive advantages of offshore finance in facilitating tax avoidance or evasion and money laundering have been eroded due to recent years' global action against tax evasion and money laundering

Magnetic relaxation and collective vortex creep in FeTe0.6_{0.6}Se0.4_{0.4} single crystal

We study the vortex dynamics in high-quality FeTe$_{0.6}$Se$_{0.4}$ single crystal by performing magnetization measurements of the screening current density \emph{J}$_s$ and flux creep rate \emph{S}. Temperature dependence of \emph{S} shows a plateau in the intermediate temperature region with a high creep rate $\sim$ 0.03, which is interpreted in the framework of the collective creep theory. A crossover from elastic to plastic creep is observed. The glassy exponent and barrier height for flux creep are directly determined by extended Maley's method. \emph{J}$_s$ with flux creep, obtained from magnetic hysteresis loops, is successfully reproduced based on the collective creep analysis. We also approach critical current density without flux creep by means of the generalized inversion scheme, which proves that the $\delta$\emph{l} and $\delta$\emph{T}$_c$ pinning coexist in FeTe$_{0.6}$Se$_{0.4}$ single crystal.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Topographic and electronic contrast of the graphene moir\'e on Ir(111) probed by scanning tunneling microscopy and non-contact atomic force microscopy

Epitaxial graphene grown on transition metal surfaces typically exhibits a moir\'e pattern due to the lattice mismatch between graphene and the underlying metal surface. We use both scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments to probe the electronic and topographic contrast of the graphene moir\'e on the Ir(111) surface. While STM topography is influenced by the local density of states close to the Fermi energy and the local tunneling barrier height, AFM is capable of yielding the 'true' surface topography once the background force arising from the van der Waals (vdW) interaction between the tip and the substrate is taken into account. We observe a moir\'e corrugation of 35$\pm$10 pm, where the graphene-Ir(111) distance is the smallest in the areas where the graphene honeycomb is atop the underlying iridium atoms and larger on the fcc or hcp threefold hollow sites.Comment: revised versio