The effectiveness of public shaming in motivating tax compliance is well documented for individuals, but less so for corporations. We analyze anticipatory effects of the EU's Directive on Public Country-by-Country Reporting (PCbCR) and its interaction with the Global Minimum Tax. PCbCR requires large multinational corporations to publicly disclose financial data from 2026; the latter imposes a "top-up" tax on undertaxed profits, which may itself become public. Listed firms with higher ex-ante exposure to public shaming (media, ESG) and voluntary disclosure activity recorded increases in their effective tax rates of 5-7 percentage points (pp) after the announcement of the reforms in 2021. In contrast, we find that banks, which are exempt from the Directive, recorded decreases in their tax rates of more than 6 pp. We point to changes in the media spotlight and NGO scrutiny to explain, in part, the heterogeneity in responses across industries.

We introduce a novel approach to analyze the role of international treaties for tax evasion, focusing on tax information exchange. First, we use a gravity model of bilateral Foreign Direct Investment to identify ‘investment anomalies’, which do not follow real economic determinants, and show that they are consistent with tax evasion patterns. We then add variables for tax information exchange to understand how these treaties are related to changes in tax evasion.

We find that Double Taxation Agreements are associated with more investment, likely including evasion, while tax information exchange is associated with an average -6% reduction in tax evasion, primarily driven by OECD Country-by-Country Reporting and the EU Directive 2011/16 with effects up to -13%. This demonstrates that Double Taxation Agreements should always be paired with tax information exchange and that the implementation of Country-by-Country Reporting should be further promoted to reduce tax evasion.

We study whether enforcement misperception arising from the opacity of tax audit systems is a feature or a bug of corporate tax compliance. Extending the seminal Allingham–Sandmo of tax evasion, firms can reduce tax liabilities via illegal evasion or legal but resource-costly avoidance. If managers overestimate audit intensity, they substitute from evasion toward avoidance rather than truthful reporting, leaving tax revenue largely unchanged while increasing deadweight costs (advisory fees, restructuring) and reducing penalty revenue. With a risk-averse manager facing personal liability, the model delivers a closed-form interior evasion choice and predicts a weaker response to perceived enforcement among more risk-averse managers. Empirically, we combine German firm survey data with administrative audit rates across German states and size classes to identify behavioral effects and quantify welfare losses.