Ownership of real estate through corporations in offshore tax havens creates opportunities for tax evasion and money laundering and may have undesirable effects in housing markets. In this paper, we study offshore ownership of real estate in the United Kingdom by combining several data sources: administrative data from the land register, a comprehensive transaction database, a propriety database on corporate ownership links, and a handful of offshore data leaks. Our descriptive analysis shows that the market share of offshore corporations has increased over time and varies strongly across market segments: It currently stands at 1.25% in the overall residential market and around 15% for top-end properties. When data leaks allow us to trace ownership through offshore corporations to the beneficial owners, we find that around half have ties to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but that the largest ‘foreign’ investor is the United Kingdom itself. Turning to causal evidence, we show that changes in tax incentives and ownership transparency induce strong responses in patterns of offshore ownership, suggesting that both taxation and secrecy are important motives for the beneficial owners. Finally, we show that the Brexit referendum was followed by a sharp increase in property sales by offshore owners and a large differential decrease in property prices in local areas with more offshore ownership, conditional on area and property characteristics. This suggests that the reduction in demand from offshore investors triggered by Brexit had a negative causal effect on property prices and, more broadly, that offshore ownership can have significant real effects in housing markets.

The French private equity ecosystem is characterised by the presence of a public investment bank, Bpifrance, which has structured and streamlined the sector since its creation in 2013. Analysing a dataset of 668 startups, each pursuing at least one UN Sustainable Development Goal and having received funding between 2008 and 2023, we identify the financing dynamics and key influencers within this ecosystem, with a particular focus on Bpifrance. Secondly, we question the influence of Bpifrance, as a direct public investor in venture capital, on the length of time between funding rounds and the ability of funded ventures to progress along the financial escalator. To this end, an event history analysis is conducted on a sample of 1,721 French ventures that raised their first seed funds between January 2000 and January 2019.

Using a text-mining approach applied to task descriptions of occupations together with worker-level administrative data, we explore the growth in the greenness of employment in Germany between 2012 and 2022. We first demonstrate that the general greening of occupations (“within-effect”) accounts for half of the overall greening of employment, whereas shifting occupational employment shares (“between-effect”) account for the other half. Second, we show which occupations contribute most to the within-effect. Third, we provide evidence which worker flows are mainly responsible for the between-effect, and which socio-demographic groups drive these labour-market transitions.

This paper provides novel evidence on the relationship between corporate taxation and firm productivity measured by total factor productivity (TFP). Existing theoretical literature suggests several channels through which taxes can affect firm productivity. Nevertheless, empirical evidence is scarce. We investigate the relationship between corporate taxation and firm productivity - overall and across the distribution of firm productivity. We also analyze how different tax system characteristics affect the development of a firm's productivity over time. Our findings suggest that a higher tax burden may drive the least productive firms out of the market and may decrease the probability of a firm moving up the productivity distribution over time.