Niels Johannesen

Can taxes tame the banks? Evidence from European bank levies

In the wake of the ?nancial crisis, a number of countries have introduced levies on bank borrowing with the aim of reducing risk in the ?nancial sector. This paper studies the behavioral responses to the bank levies and evaluates the policy. We ?nd that the levies induced banks to borrow less but also to hold more risky assets. The reduction in funding risk clearly dominates for banks with high capital ratios but is exactly o¤set by the increase in portfolio risk for banks with low capital ratios. This suggests that while the levies have reduced the total risk of relatively safe banks, they have done nothing to curb the risk of relatively risky banks, which presumably pose the greatest threat to ?nancial stability.

The Run for Safety: Financial Fragility and Deposit Insurance

We study the impact of too big to fail (TBTF) guarantees on bank competition for retail deposits. Exploiting information about all personal deposit accounts in Denmark and salient changes to the deposit insurance limit, we provide evidence that systemically important banks successfully retain and attract uninsured deposits in a crisis at the expense of other banks even as they differentially lower their interest rates. The funding shock suffered by non-systemic banks causes a decrease in their lending. The results point to distortive effects of TBTF guarantees in the market for retail deposits.

The Consumption Effects of the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis: Evidence from Household-Level Data

Did the financial crisis spread from distressed banks to households through a contraction of the credit supply? We study this question with a dataset that contains observations on all accounts in Danish banks as well as comprehensive information about individual account holders and banks. We show that banks exposed to the financial crisis reduced their credit supply significantly and that their customers reduced both borrowing and consumption relative to customers in non-exposed banks. The credit supply channel can explain roughly one third of the decrease in aggregate private consumption observed in Denmark between 2007 and 2009.

Who owns the wealth in tax havens? Macro evidence and implications for global inequality

Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf countries and some Latin American economies. We use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries, which account for close to half of world GDP. Because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top, accounting for it increases the top 0.01% wealth share substantially in Europe, even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively. It has considerable effects in Russia, where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore. These results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world.

The Deterrence Effect of Whistleblowing – An Event Study of Leaked Customer Information from Banks in Tax Havens

We document that the first leak of customer information from a tax haven bank caused a sudden flight of deposits from tax havens and a sharp decrease in the market value of banks known to be assisting with tax evasion. The loss of market value was largest for the banks most strongly involved in tax evasion and zero for banks with no known ties to tax evasion. Subsequent leaks had qualitatively similar although smaller effects. Our findings suggest that whistleblowing in tax haven banks deters offshore tax evaders by increasing the perceived risk of committing and assisting with tax evasion.