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Abstract:
In the last two decades, tax avoidance has risen to the top of the agenda of policy makers and international organizations. The majority of political action and academic research has focused on the macro-level of states, pointing towards the responsibility of ‘tax havens’ or ‘offshore financial centers’. Research on the micro-level has demonstrated the importance of non-state actors who facilitate tax planning, but tax advisors have never been studied systematically with global data. In this paper, we connect the micro and macro levels. We map tax advisors geographically using a novel empirical approach based on LinkedIn. We show that tax advisors generally locate in large cities in the EU and OECD, rather than in places targeted as ‘tax havens’. We further consider what determines the locations of tax advisors. Using multiple regression analysis, we find that locations of tax advisors does not correlate with the location of corporate profits, financial secrecy, or economic activity. Rather, it correlates with the managerial and financial activity. Our results underscore the core-periphery structure in offshore finance. Effective regulation of tax avoidance should focus on tax advisors, not only on the destination of money flows, since the active facilitation does not occur in those places.
