EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Big Bang: Tax Evasion After Automatic Exchange of Information Under FATCA and CRS

Leo Ahrens and Fabio Bothner

New Political Economy, 2020, vol. 25, issue 6, 849-864

Abstract: After decades of ineffective attempts to fight tax evasion, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) recently implemented the first encompassing international exchange of tax-related information on an automatic basis. This is an important development because tax evasion contributes to rising socio-political inequality and political sovereignty losses. This article assesses the treaties’ impact on tax evasion by conducting a difference-in-difference analysis of cross-border asset data. The results show that the treaties are successful. Household assets in tax havens that are not hidden behind corporate identities are estimated to be 67 per cent lower than they would have been without automatic exchange of information. Furthermore, this reduction is not offset by an increase in treaty circumvention using identity concealment or asset shifting to non-compliant jurisdictions. FATCA and CRS thus implement the first effective international cooperation against tax evasion. The results imply that political globalisation is capable to mitigate the political sovereignty losses and rise of inequality caused by economic globalisation.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2019.1639651 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:25:y:2020:i:6:p:849-864

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cnpe20

DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2019.1639651

Access Statistics for this article

New Political Economy is currently edited by Professor Colin Hay

More articles in New Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:25:y:2020:i:6:p:849-864