Corruption, Tax Abuse, and Financial Secrecy PhD Dissertation, Miroslav Palanský, IES CUNI, 2020 Abstract This dissertation is composed of three papers that focus on different aspects of the relationship between the public sector and individuals who do not comply with the norms and regulations set by the government. I classify the ways in which individuals do so into two categories - corruption and tax abuse. Corruption, defined as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, results in individuals obtaining more benefits from the public sector than is intended. Tax abuse, on the other hand, is defined as contributing less to the public sector than is intended. The last chapter of the dissertation focuses on financial secrecy, which I argue is the key facilitator of the two channels. In Chapter 2, I show that companies that donate money to Czech political parties subsequently report abnormally high profits, pointing to preferential treatment that these firms enjoy as a result of their political connections: I conservatively estimate that the connected firms outperform their non-connected but otherwise similar competitors by 8 to 12% following the establishment of the connection, which is a higher effect than found previously for more developed economies. Importantly, however, I find that the effect...

Magister Legum - LLM