In the new Skatteforsk paper, "Global Financial Transparency and Offshore Wealth Accumulation" by Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, Ségal Le Guern Herry, and Gabriel Zucman, uses detailed Norwegian administrative data to ask the question: when a policy reform makes offshore banking transparent, does it actually stop new money from flowing offshore to evade taxes or does it just push existing offshore wealth to come home while new fortunes keep finding their way out?
Find the full working paper here.
The reform in question is the shift to automatic exchange of information (AEOI), championed by the G20 starting in 2013 and rolled out via the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) in more than 100 countries. Under AEOI, banks abroad must identify accounts held by foreign residents and automatically report account balances and income back to the account holder's home tax authority no request required, no suspicion needed. It replaced weaker, largely ineffective tools like information-exchange-on-request and voluntary disclosure programs.
What the data shows
Norway turns out to be an unusually good place to study this, because tax authorities there have access to something rare: transaction-level records of cross-border bank transfers, combined with individual wealth data from the country's net wealth tax returns. With data from Statistics Norway, that combination lets the authors trace the entire chain from a household getting richer, to money moving offshore, to what happens to that household's tax bill.
Three findings stand out
1. Newly wealthy households have largely stopped sending money offshore
Before 2013, a household moving from median wealth into the top 0.1% saw its odds of making a large transfer (above NOK 100,000, roughly $10,000) to a tax haven jump by about 30 times. After 2013, that same jump in wealth produced only about a 3-fold increase, a dramatically smaller effect. Transfers to non-haven countries, by contrast, kept climbing just as steeply as before, which suggests the change is specific to tax havens rather than a general pullback from cross-border banking.
2. Offshore transfers that still happen no longer look like tax evasion
Before the reform, households that sent large sums to tax havens saw their reported tax payments drop by about 7% in the following years, driven by a 19% drop in reported financial wealth a classic signature of assets disappearing. After the reform, that effect vanished: tax payments and reported wealth barely moved (changes of about 1%, not statistically distinguishable from zero) after a transfer to a haven. Wages and real estate holdings didn't shift either way, ruling out simpler explanations like retirement or emigration.
3. Wealthy households are turning to holding companies but not to hide money offshore
There is one twist: people becoming wealthy are now more likely to set up personal holding companies than before (a 30-fold increase in the top 0.1%, versus 20-fold before the reform). That could sound like a red flag, a more sophisticated way to dodge scrutiny. But when the researchers checked whether wealth was flowing from those holding companies to tax havens, they found the opposite: this channel actually became less common after 2013. The likelier explanation is legal tax planning and deferral, not evasion, companies are still required to disclose beneficial owners under AEOI, so the secrecy advantage evaporates either way.
Why it matters
Prior research on financial transparency has mostly looked at what happens to existing offshore wealth whether people already holding money abroad repatriate it or disclose it once transparency arrives. This paper instead asks whether transparency stops new offshore fortunes from forming in the first place, which matters just as much for the long-run size of the problem. If old money comes home but new money keeps flowing out, offshore evasion never really goes away, it just changes hands. The evidence here suggests that's not what's happening: automatic information exchange appears to be deterring the formation of new illicit offshore wealth, not just prompting a one-time cleanup of old holdings.