In his paper, Lukas shows how the liberalization of the common market facilitated cross-border mergers and transactions between related firms. Policymakers knew this would intensify tax competition among member states. Yet, fundamental disagreement between capital importing and capital exporting countries paired with the unanimity requirement in tax matters kept them from harmonizing their corporate tax […]

The GUE/NGL group in the EU parliament published a report July 5th 2017 by Saila Stausholm of Copenhagen Business School and Richard Murphy of City, University London, entitled ‘The Big Four: a study in opacity’. The report is the first of its kind investigating the structure of the Big Four firms, and finds that while […]

Leyla Ates’s recently published a country report on Turkey entitled “Assessing BEPS: origins, standards and responses” within the framework of the 71st Congress of IFA which will take place in Brazil later this year (August 27-September 01, 2017). In her report, she identifies a number of specific issues pertaining to Turkey, including the problem of […]

Together with his co-author Max Schaub, COFFERS researcher Lukas Hakelberg just published an article in Regulation & Governance on the redistributive impact of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the multilateral automatic exchange of information (AEI) regime it precipitated. The authors perform a difference-in-differences analysis comparing banks’ deposit and debt security liabilities to […]

Lukas Hakelberg and Thomas Rixen from COFFERS working package 3 at the University of Bamberg wrote an accessible popular science piece on the purported end of tax havens for the social science supplement of the German Bundestag’s weekly newspaper (Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte). They show how tax competition and tax havens emerged after governments had […]

As the German legislative process for the implementation of the 4th EU anti-money laundering directive hits the home straight, the draft law has become under increasing pressure from researchers and civil society. In a public hearing in the finance committee of the German Bundestag on Monday, 24th April, Tax Justice Network, Transparency International and others […]

CBS/COFFERS PhD fellow Saila Stausholm went to the IMF in Washington, D.C. to give a presentation about her paper on tax incentives, entitled “Give us a break: the impact of tax holidays on developing countries”. Her research looks at the phenomenon of tax holidays and its effect on developing countries in terms of economic and […]

The OECD’s Global Forum is set to publish the terms of reference for peer reviews on automatic exchange of information pursuant to the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard (CRS) in the near future. The terms of reference for that peer review process in many ways will define how the system of Automatic Exchange of Information works […]

Alex Cobham, research director of Tax Justice Network and COFFERS researcher, recently published jointly with TJN’s Andres Knobel a brief analysis of a new OECD specification on Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) – a topic very dear to COFFERS. Their analysis shows that OECD’s new terms of reference  to assess the implementation by countries of BEPS Action […]

A new article in a Review of International Political Economy special section on Global Wealth Chains edited by COFFERS researchers Leonard Seabrooke and Duncan Wigan. Here, with Dick Bryan and Mike Rafferty, Duncan explores conceptual and regulatory challenges posed by the rise of the knowledge economy and intangible assets, such a intellectual property, in terms […]