Pricing Offshore Services: Evidence from the Paradise Papers

Abstract

The Paradise Papers represent one of the largest public data leaks comprising 13.4 million con_dential electronic documents. A dominant theory presented by Neal (2014) and Gri_th, Miller and O'Connell (2014) concerns the use of these offshore services in the relocation of intellectual property for the purposes of compliance, privacy and tax avoidance. Building on the work of Fernandez (2011), Billio et al. (2016) and Kou, Peng and Zhong (2018) in Spatial Arbitrage Pricing Theory (s-APT) and work by Kelly, Lustig and Van Nieuwerburgh (2013), Ahern (2013), Herskovic (2018) and Proch_azkov_a (2020) on the impacts of network centrality on _rm pricing, we use market response, discussed in O'Donovan, Wagner and Zeume (2019), to characterise the role of offshore services in securities pricing and the transmission of price risk. Following the spatial modelling selection procedure proposed in Mur and Angulo (2009), we identify Pro_t Margin and Price-to-Research as firm-characteristics describing market response over this event window. Using a social network lag explanatory model, we provide evidence for social exogenous effects, as described in Manski (1993), which may characterise the licensing or exchange of intellectual property between connected firms found in the Paradise Papers. From these findings, we hope to provide insight to policymakers on the role and impact of offshore services on securities pricing

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