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Characteristics of tax havens and their users
Sovičová, Veronika ; Janský, Petr (advisor) ; Poláková, Nikol (referee)
The purpose of the thesis is to address the characteristics of the countries that tend to engage in tax haven practices - both tax havens and their users. In the descriptive part of the thesis, we review a number of common traits of the countries that become tax havens. We mostly focus on the features other than those directly related to provision of financial services, such as bank secrecy or low/non-existent tax rates. Our primary interest are the characteristics that may contribute to the adoption of tax haven status. Subsequently, we employ the method of ordinary least squares to examine the traits of the countries that use tax haven services. Specifically, we are interested whether countries with certain characteristics tend to own greater shares of global offshore wealth than others. We include the traits such as corruption, top marginal income tax rates, inflation, GDP, or country's distance from Switzerland to examine the relationship. Some of our most interesting findings are that top marginal income tax rates are negatively correlated with the offshore-held amount of wealth and, contrary to common belief, more corrupt countries appear to have lower offshore wealth shares.
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