Research notes
Published papers on trade, finance, migration and knowledge whose replication data sits in a public archive. Each note states the question the authors asked, what they found, and what this platform's own data can add to it — including, where it applies, that it can add nothing.
Why do central banks hold so many dollars, and what are they insuring against?
Mitali Das et al. (2026) · IMF Working Paper
Das, Gopinath, Hall, Kim and Stein document across 56 countries that central bank dollar reserve holdings correlate with how much the domestic corporate...
FinanceWhat happens to a country's creditworthiness when some of its debts are secret?
Laura Alfaro, Fabio Kanczuk (2023) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 112
Alfaro and Kanczuk address the rise of non-Paris Club lending, notably from China, to low- and middle-income countries. Unlike traditional sovereign debt...
FinanceDo foreign-owned firms report less profit than identical domestic ones?
Katarzyna Anna Bilicka (2019) · American Economic Review 109(8)
Bilicka uses confidential UK corporate tax return data and finds foreign multinational subsidiaries report taxable profits relative to assets at half the...
FinanceDo capital flows around the world move to their own rhythm, or to one set in Washington?
Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Hélène Rey (2020) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 110
Miranda-Agrippino and Rey document the Global Financial Cycle: risky asset prices, intermediary leverage, credit growth and gross capital flows across the...
FinanceWho ends up paying when a bank's foreign income is taxed twice?
Harry Huizinga, Johannes Voget, Wolf Wagner (2014) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6(2)
Huizinga, Voget and Wagner examine banks across 38 countries from 1998 to 2008. International double taxation of foreign-source bank income reduces...
FinanceWhy is it so hard for a middle-income country to tax the multinationals operating inside it?
Sebastián Bustos et al. (2019) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 109
Bustos, Pomeranz, Vila-Belda and Zucman use Chile as a case study of a general problem. Multinationals account for a large share of Chilean GDP yet report...
FinanceDo firms shade the prices on their own invoices to move profit across a border?
Anca D. Cristea, Daniel X. Nguyen (2016) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 8(3)
Cristea and Nguyen use Danish export transactions from 1999 to 2006, identifying from the moment a firm acquires a foreign affiliate and from changes in...
FinanceIf profits are booked in the wrong country, which national statistics are wrong?
Fatih Guvenen et al. (2022) · American Economic Review
Guvenen, Mataloni, Rassier and Ruhl show that profit shifting does not merely move tax revenue — it corrupts headline measures of the US economy. From 1982...
FinanceCan receiving too much foreign capital make a rich country grow more slowly?
Gianluca Benigno, Luca Fornaro, Martin Wolf (2024) · Journal of Political Economy
Benigno, Fornaro and Wolf connect two facts about the United States since the late 1990s: large capital inflows from developing countries, the so-called...
FinanceWhy do careful estimates of profit shifting differ by an order of magnitude?
Dhammika Dharmapala (2019) · AEA Papers and Proceedings 109
Dharmapala reviews the measurement of profit shifting and finds the divergence between microeconomic estimates from firm data and macroeconomic estimates...
FinanceDo taxes push foreign investment away, and does it depend on what the investment is for?
Nils Herger (2016) · International Tax and Public Finance
Herger decomposes cross-border mergers — the dominant form of FDI — into horizontal and vertical strategies over 1999 to 2010, and finds the tax effect is...
FinanceIf a firm books a sale in a tax haven while the goods are sold somewhere else, what does that look like in the statistics?
Sébastien Laffitte, Farid Toubal (2022) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
Laffitte and Toubal show that US multinationals record sales, and the profit on those sales, in tax havens while the goods and services are physically sold...
Where a note says the data is behind a login, that is openICPSR, which refuses non-browser requests. Those notes rest on the published abstract and on our own observations, never on files we could not open.