317 research outputs found
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 FeTeSe single crystal
We study the vortex dynamics in high-quality FeTeSe single
crystal by performing magnetization measurements of the screening current
density \emph{J} and flux creep rate \emph{S}. Temperature dependence of
\emph{S} shows a plateau in the intermediate temperature region with a high
creep rate 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} 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 \emph{l} and
\emph{T} pinning coexist in FeTeSe 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 3510 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
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