Offshore Tax Evasion and Wealth Inequality: Evidence from a Tax Amnesty in the Netherlands

While tax administrations have made considerable progress in fighting tax evasion, it remains a seemingly inextricable part of our world. Exploiting unique datasets covering over 28,000 tax evaders in the Netherlands, Wouter Leenders, Arjan Lejour, Simon Rabaté and Maarten van’t Riet investigate the distribution of tax evasion and its implications for the measurement of wealth inequality. They show that the distributional pattern of tax evasion depends on the type of tax evasion, e.g. it depends on the offshore country of choice. They explore a number of explanations to account for the differences in results and caution against projecting distributional patterns of detected tax evasion onto still undetected evasion.