James R. Hines Jr.

James R. Hines Jr. (born July 9, 1958) is an American economist and a founder of academic research into corporate-focused tax havens, and the effect of U.S. corporate tax policy on the behaviors of U.S. multinationals. He currently serves as the Richard A. Musgrave Collegiate Professor of Economics and the L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.

Hines is the most cited author on the research of tax havens, and his work on tax havens was relied upon by the CEA when drafting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. His papers were some of the first to analyse profit shifting, and to establish quantitative features of tax havens. Hines showed that being a tax haven could be a prosperous strategy for a jurisdiction, and controversially, that tax havens can promote economic growth. Hines showed that use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals had maximized long-term U.S. exchequer tax receipts, at the expense of other jurisdictions.

Career James Hines was born in Chicago in 1958. He attended Yale University for his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in 1980. He completed his PhD in Harvard University in 1986. After various teaching and research posts in Princeton University and Harvard University, in 1997 he became Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. Hines is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research director of the International Tax Policy Forum.

Hines has testified to Congress on public tax policy on a number of occasions, and is quoted on related issues by the financial media, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ("TCJA").

Tax haven research Hines-Rice paper In February 1994, Hines and his Harvard PhD student, Eric M. Rice, published their 1990 National Bureau of Economic Research ("NBER") working paper (No. 3477), in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, on the use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals, which contained a number of important findings.

The 1994 Hines-Rice paper is recognised as the first important paper into BEPS and tax havens, and it is the most cited research paper in history on tax havens. The 1994 Hines-Rice paper has been cited by all subsequent most cited research papers into tax havens, including by Desai, Dharmapala, Slemrod, and Zucman.

The two most recent U.S. congressional investigations into tax havens: the 2008 investigation by the Government Accountability Office, and the 2015 investigation by the Congressional Research Service, identify the 1994 Hines-Rice paper as the first credible list of global tax havens, and the first quantitative analysis of what constitutes a tax haven.

Subsequent research His subsequent 2007–2011 papers on tax havens showed that major tax havens, including Ireland, Singapore, Bermuda, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, were well governed and prosperous economies, from being tax havens: Tax havens are successful players in the world economy. He also asserted that tax havens could stimulate economic activity in nearby high-tax countries, by addressing issues in their tax systems, however this conclusion has been controversial and has drawn criticism from advocates of tax justice as being supportive of corporate tax avoidance by multinationals.

While Hines always avoided constructing overly specific or quantitative definitions of a tax haven, because of the variability in the types of economies that he had identified as tax havens, Hines does use a general definition that he employed during research with fellow tax-haven expert, Dhammaka Dharmapala, in 2009:

In November 2017, Hines was awarded the Daniel M. Holland Medal by the National Tax Association for his work, the second youngest winner in the medal's history.

In December 2017, his papers were cited by Harvard Professor Mihir A. Desai as ones that: changed the field and provided the roadmap for much of the next thirty years. In 2016, Hines, working with German academics, showed that German multinationals make little use of tax havens because the German corporate taxation system follows a "territorial" model. Hines cites the example of Ireland, a country featured on all of Hines' tax haven lists, which has rarely attracted firms from "territorial" taxation systems.

His research in this area was cited, although sometimes controversially so, by the Council of Economic Advisors ("CEA") in drafting the TCJA legislation in 2017; and advocating for reducing U.S. corporate taxes and moving to a hybrid "territorial" tax system framework, in order to drive U.S. employment and wage growth.

Hines tax havens

Hines-Rice 1994 list Because it is cited as the first coherent academic list of tax havens, the 41 jurisdictions from Appendix 2 in Hines-Rice (1994) are listed below, in the three sub-categories Hines-Rice used. The 7 major tax havens identified by Hines-Rice, who represent over 89% of tax haven GDP, are marked with a dagger (†). Another major quantitative study in June 2018 by Gabriel Zucman (et alia), produced a list whose ten largest havens also matched nine of Hines' top ten havens from 2010.

Ten largest havens, as specifically estimated by Hines, from the Hines 2010 list of 52 tax havens:

The full list of 52 tax havens from the Hines 2010 list, are shown below (Hines did not rank the full list, only the largest):

(†) Identified as one of the 5 Conduits by CORPNET in 2017; the above list has 4 of the 5. (‡) Identified as one of the largest 24 Sinks by CORPNET in 2017; the above list has 21 of the 24. (↕) Identified on the European Union's first 2017 list of 17 tax havens; the above list contains 8 of the 17. (Δ) Identified on the first, and the largest, OECD 2000 list of 35 tax havens (the OECD list only contained Trinidad & Tobago by 2017); the above list contains 34 of the 35. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24 (4) 661–679 Dhammika Dharmapala, James Hines 2008 7 In praise of tax havens: International tax planning and foreign direct investment European Economic Review 54 (1) 82–95 Qing Hong, Michael Smart 2010 8 End of bank secrecy: An Evaluation of the G20 tax haven crackdown American Economic Journal 6 (1) 65–91 Niels Johannesen, Gabriel Zucman 2014 9 Taxing across borders: Tracking personal wealth and corporate profits Journal of Economic Perspectives 28 (4) 121–148 Gabriel Zucman 2014 10 Treasure Islands Journal of Economic Perspectives 24 (4) 103–26 James Hines 2010