Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers: Conduits and Sinks in the Global Corporate Ownership Network.

ABSTRACT: Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient regulation, but are increasingly under scrutiny, for instance for enabling tax avoidance. Therefore, the identification of OFC jurisdictions has become a politicized and contested issue. We introduce a novel data-driven approach for identifying OFCs based on the global corporate ownership network, in which over 98 million firms (nodes) are connected through 71 million ownership relations. This granular firm-level network data uniquely allows identifying both sink-OFCs and conduit-OFCs. Sink-OFCs attract and retain foreign capital while conduit-OFCs are attractive interm

SUBMITTER: Garcia-Bernardo J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5524793 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature