Escaping the exchange of information: Tax evasion via citizenship-by-investment

With automatic exchange of tax information among countries now common, tax evaders have had to find new ways to hide their offshore holdings. One such way is citizenship-by-investment, which offers for-eigners a new passport for a local investment or a fixed fee. We show analytically that high-income indi-viduals acquire a new citizenship to lower the probability that their tax evasion is detected through information exchange. Using data on cross-border bank deposits, we find that deposits in tax havens increase after a country starts offering a citizenship-by-investment program, providing indirect evidence that tax evaders use these programs. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).