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.

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.

James Hines was born in Chicago in 1958.

He went to Yale University for his B.Sc and M.Sc in 1980.

He completed his PhD in Harvard University in 1986.

Hines-Rice note that the U.S. IRS had identified 29 of their list as potential tax havens in 1987:

• Antigua & Barbuda

• Bahamas

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.

1. Base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS").

Hines-Rice showed U.S. multinationals were using non-traditional tax havens, like Ireland and Singapore, that had large networks of tax treaties (which traditional tax havens are restricted from having), enabling them to avoid corporate taxes in all jurisdictions that had tax treaties with the haven, by a technique they called profit shifting;

2. Corporate tax havens.

Hines-Rice noted that several of the most favoured locations for U.S. multinationals, such as Ireland, had normal headline corporate tax rates, but their tax regimes enabled accounting techniques to produce much lower effective corporate tax rates (e.g. Ireland was the lowest at 4%); these were the little-understood BEPS tools of the emerging corporate tax havens;

3. Definition of a tax haven.

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.

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 (†).

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 is the most cited author on research into tax havens, and has co-authored several papers in the, including the most cited paper.

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.

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.

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:

"Tax havens are typically small, well-governed states that impose low or zero tax rates on foreign investors."

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.

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.

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").

An unexpected conclusion from Hines-Rice was that: low foreign tax rates [from tax havens] ultimately enhance U.S. tax collections; by paying little/no foreign taxes, U.S. multinationals had avoided building up foreign tax credits; the 15.5% Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 levy would prove this finding again in 2017.

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.

As well as his work on BEPS and on tax havens, Hines is known for research into how U.S. corporate taxation, and the marginal rate of U.S. corporation tax, drives the behaviours of U.S multinationals.

Hines has been a strong advocate of moving the U.S. to a "territorial" tax model.

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-Rice felt the variations between havens was too material for a single definition, beyond a requirement for low effective tax rates; distortions from profit shifting led them to note proxies, including: the GDP-per-capita proxy, and the corporate profitabity proxy; in June 2018, these tools were used to show that Ireland was the largest tax haven;

4. U.S. as a beneficiary from tax havens.