Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
In the second half of the 2010s more than 100 countries—including all large offshore financial centers—started to automatically exchange bank information with foreign tax authorities. This informational big-bang marks a break with the situation of offshore bank secrecy that prevailed before. We study its effects on tax compliance by analyzing the universe of information reports sent by foreign banks to Danish authorities, matched to population-wide micro-data on income, wealth, and cross-border bank transfers. In response to the automatic exchange of bank information, tax evaders may repatriate previously undeclared offshore wealth, they may start to self-report offshore income to the tax authorities, or the tax authorities may detect their evasion in audits that use the new information reports. Using a variety of research designs, we find large compliance effects along all these margins, with the largest response coming from repatriation of wealth. Overall we estimate that the automatic exchange of bank information has closed about
70% of the offshore tax gap. These results highlight the power of international cooperation to improve tax compliance: tax evasion is not a law of nature in a globalized world.
