EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows: The Role of Cross-Border Financing and Tax Havens

Matteo Maggiori, Antonio Coppola, Brent Neiman and Jesse Schreger

No 14508, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their true economic location in official statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities issued by firms in tax havens with their issuer’s ultimate parent and restate bilateral investment positions to better reflect the financial linkages connecting countries around the world. Portfolio investment from developed countries to firms in large emerging markets is dramatically larger than previously thought. The national accounts of the United States, for example, understate the U.S. position in Chinese firms by nearly 600 billion dollars, while China’s official net creditor position to the rest of the world is overstated by about 50 percent. Further, we demonstrate how offshore issuance in tax havens affects our understanding of the currency composition of external portfolio liabilities and the nature of foreign direct investment. Finally, we provide additional restatements of bilateral investment positions, including one based the geographic distribution of sales.

Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ifn and nep-opm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14508 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows: The Role of Cross-Border Financing and Tax Havens* (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows: The Role of Cross-Border Financing and Tax Havens (2020) Downloads
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:cpr:ceprdp:14508

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14508

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-01-16
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14508