Research

Excellent research group:

I am the director of the CORPTAX research group at the Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czechia. We aim to establish how much multinational corporations pay in taxes, to what extent these taxes are paid in tax havens, and which factors drive these patterns. Ultimately, we aim to use theoretical, methodological and empirical innovations to transform the understanding of corporate taxation in a globalised world. We are an international team of researchers collaborating with leading academics worldwide as well as influential international organisations. CORPTAX has been funded by various research grants, including since January 2021 by the Czech Science Foundation (21-05547M).

Selected recent academic journal publications:

• Decomposing Multinational Corporations’ Declining Effective Tax Rates, IMF Economic Review, forthcoming, IES Working Paper, with Javier Garcia-Bernardo and Thomas Tørsløv.
• A Practical Proposal to End Corporate Tax Abuse: METR, a Minimum Effective Tax Rate for Multinationals, Global Policy, 2022, IES Working Paper. with Alex Cobham, Tomasso Faccio, Javier Garcia-Bernardo, Jeffrey Kadet, and Sol Picciotto.
• Is Panama really your tax haven? Secrecy jurisdictions and the countries they harm, Regulation & Governance, 2021, with Markus Meinzer and Miroslav Palanský. (WP).
• Multinational Corporations and Tax Havens: Evidence from Country-by-Country Reporting, International Tax and Public Finance, 2021, with Javier Garcia-Bernardo and Thomas Tørsløv. (The latest version; WP).

Selected recent working papers:

• Did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Reduce Profit Shifting by US Multinational Companies?, 2021, with Javier Garcia-Bernardo and Gabriel Zucman.
• Profit Shifting of Multinational Corporations Worldwide, 2021, IES Working Paper, with Javier Garcia-Bernardo. (Financial Times, Twitter.)
• Hide–seek–hide? The effects of financial secrecy on cross-border financial assets, UNU-WIDER working paper, with Tereza Palanská and Miroslav Palanský.

Selected research in progress:

• Fiscal Consequences of Corporate Tax Avoidance, with Katarzyna Bilicka and Evgeniya Dubinina.
• The indirect effects of corporate tax avoidance exacerbate inequality, with Garcia-Bernardo, Daniel Haberly, Miroslav Palanský, and Valeria Secchini.
• Transparency just for show: Analyzing new country-by-country reporting data as an avenue for improving international economic statistics, with Saila Stausholm and Marek Šedivý.
• The Effect of Private Country-by-Country Reporting on Tax Avoidance: a Regression Discontinuity Approach, with Tijmen Tuinsma, Kristof De Witte, Vitezslav Titl, and Miroslav Palanský.
• Shallow and Uneven Progress Towards Global Financial Transparency: Evidence from the Financial Secrecy Index, 2011-2020, with Dariusz Wójcik and Miroslav Palanský.
• Incremental improvement, enhancing trust: evaluating the emancipatory impact of public country-by-country reporting, with Franki Hackett.
• The Revenue Potential of Excess Profits Tax, with Evgeniya Dubinina and Javier Garcia-Bernardo.

Book:

• Estimating illicit financial flows: A critical guide to the data, methodologies and findings, Oxford University Press, 2020, with Alex Cobham (PDF).

Other recent working papers

• How Much Multinational Corporations Pay in Taxes and Where – Evidence from their Country-by-Country Reports, 2021, IES Working Paper, with Tommaso Faccio, Sarah Godar and Oliver Seabarron
• Multinational Corporations’ Effective Tax Rates: Evidence from Orbis, 2020, IES Working Paper, with Javier Garcia-Bernardo and Thomas Tørsløv. (Effective tax rates for multinational enterprises in the EU, a related policy paper for Greens/EFA group in the European parliament, 2019.)
• How Do Regional Price Levels Affect Income Inequality? Household-Level Evidence from 21 Countries, Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper, 2018, with Marek Šedivý.

Other recent academic journal publications:

• Tax Treaties Worldwide: Estimating Elasticities and Revenue Foregone, Review of International Economics, 2021, with Jan Láznička and Miroslav Palanský. (The latest version; WP).
• An evaluation of the effects of the European Commission’s proposals for the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base, Transnational Corporations, 28(1), 29, with Alex Cobham, Chris Jones and Yama Temouri. (WP)
• Corporate profit misalignment: Evidence from German headquarter companies and their foreign affiliates, Post-Communist Economies, 2020, with Sarah Godar. (WP).
• The Costs of Tax Havens: Evidence from Industry-Level Data, Applied Economics, forthcoming. (WP.)
• European Banks and Tax Havens: Evidence from Country-by-Country Reporting, Applied Economics, forthcoming. (WP).
• Estimating the scale of profit shifting and tax revenue losses related to foreign direct investment, International Tax and Public Finance, 2019, with Miroslav Palanský.
• Estimating the Revenue Costs of Tax Treaties in Developing Countries, World Economy, 2019, with Marek Šedivý.
• Measuring Misalignment: The Location of US Multinationals’ Economic Activity versus the Location of their Profits, Development Policy Review, 2019, with Alex Cobham.
• The Poor outside the Lamplight: On the Prevalence of Poverty among Population Groups Not Included in Household Surveys, Post-Communist Economies, 2019, with Matěj Bajgar and Klára Kalíšková.
• Global distribution of revenue loss from corporate tax avoidance: re-estimation and country results, Journal of International Development, 2018, with Alex Cobham.

All my research publications are listed in my CV.