A growing body of economics literature shows that multinational corporations (MNCs) shift their profits to tax havens. We contribute to this evidence by comparing a range of available data sets focusing on US MNCs, including country-by-country reporting data, a full sample of which has been released in December 2019 for the first time. With each of the data sets, we analyse the effective tax rates that US MNCs face in each country and the amount of profits they report. Using country-by-country reporting data, we have been able to establish that lower effective corporate tax rates are associated with higher levels of reported profits when compared with different indicators of real economic activity. This corresponds to the notion that MNCs often shift profits to countries with low effective tax rates—without also shifting substantive economic activity. Consequently, we identify the most important tax havens for US MNCs as countries with both low effective tax rates and high profits misaligned with economic activity.

越来越多的经济学文献表明，跨国公司（MNC）将其利润转移到避税天堂。我们通过比较针对美国跨国公司的一系列可用数据集（包括逐国报告数据）为这一证据做出了贡献，其完整样本已于2019年12月首次发布。通过每个数据集，我们分析了美国跨国公司在每个国家面临的有效税率以及它们报告的利润额。使用逐个国家的报告数据，我们能够确定，与不同的实际经济活动指标相比，较低的有效公司税率与较高的报告利润水平相关。这与以下概念相对应：跨国公司经常将利润转移到有效税率较低的国家，而不会转移实质性的经济活动。因此，我们将美国跨国公司确定为最重要的避税天堂，因为这些国家的有效税率低且利润高，与经济活动不符。