During the past decade, publications in the field of economics have increasingly used leaked data to better describe and explain the phenomena around us. Just in the past eight years, at least twenty-two economics papers have been published using leaked financial data, with the majority of them having been published in the last three years. Even though it is clear that financial leaks have become increasingly available to academic researchers over the past years, it is also apparent that academia has lagged behind in its ability to apply appropriate ethical and data-protection standards to such data. As a result, a number of academic institutions such as the American Economic Association have started to issue policies about the academic use of illegally obtained data, in an attempt to minimize the risks associated with its use. Following Annette Alstadsæter’s keynote lecture at this year’s congress, this special session will dive deeper into the ethical and practical considerations that researchers face today when using leaked data in their work. By hearing the first-hand experiences of researchers that have previously worked with leaked data, the participants will have the opportunity to better understand and discuss in an open panel format: I) what are the different sources of leaked data; II) the utilization of large-scale leaks and how to construct relevant datasets from these; III) assessing the validity and legitimacy of acquired data; and, IV) the challenges and opportunities in GDPR compliance, and V) how to ensure data integrity and security of the team members.

The global minimum tax reform—agreed by more than 130 countries in 2021 and in effect in the European Union and other countries since January 2024—is the biggest change in taxing multinationals in decades if not a century. The reform comes in the wake of sizeable and increasing tax avoidance and a decade of not-so-successful attempts by governments to reduce it. Is the reform an imperfect success story and how will it end? The effects of the global minimum tax on firms and governments are far from clear due to the reform’s complexity, uncertainty about how they will respond to it, and unavailability of suitable timely data. Therefore, to explore the likely impact of the global minimum tax, this special session brings together experts with backgrounds in policy, theory, and empirics. What are the likely short-term impacts on revenue and beyond? What are the likely long-term impacts on behaviour of governments and companies? What does the reform imply for inequalities and how heterogenous are likely to be the impacts across developing and developed countries, and tax havens?

Since 2016, most large multinational companies have been required to submit country-by-country reports, detailing the distribution of their economic activity, reported profits, and taxes paid in each jurisdictions in which they operate. Each MNE reports this data to the tax administration of its headquarter country which then shares this information with the tax administrations of all countries in which that particular MNE operates. This data is not made available to the public at the company-level, only at the aggregate level as part of the OECD Corporate Tax Statistics (at least until late 2025). However, in recent years, several research teams have collaborated with tax administrations (in France, Italy, Germany, and Slovakia) to analyze this confidential data to assess the potential impact of proposed reforms, quantify the scale of misalignment of economic activity and reported profits, and in general analyze the behaviour of multinational companies. In this session, we review the lessons learned from these efforts.