Where money hides, who builds the hiding places, and who is paid to make them appear legitimate.
I study where money hides, who constructs the structures that conceal it, and who is paid to make those arrangements appear legitimate. My work ranges from tax planning within multinational enterprises to the international rules intended to constrain it, as well as the political consequences that follow when those rules prove ineffective. My current work with a group of Nordic colleagues examines why most Nordic countries abolished or substantially reduced their wealth taxes during the 1990s and early 2000s. Earlier research:
- Politicisation of Global Tax Governance: Mapping the Research Agenda (Global Political Economy, with Teppo Eskelinen, 2026). The article maps the conflicts that have emerged as global tax governance has expanded beyond its traditional institutional and thematic boundaries. It identifies three areas requiring closer study: competition among international institutions, demands for more representative tax policymaking, and the growing connections between international taxation, trade, human rights, and social justice.
- The Politics of Intra-Firm Trade: Corporate Price Planning and the Double Role of the Arm’s Length Principle (New Political Economy, with Teivo Teivainen, 2018). The article examined the arm’s length principle not merely as a technical rule but as a political institution that structures how multinational enterprises allocate income among jurisdictions. An earlier version received Yale University’s Amartya Sen Prize in 2015.
- Panama and the WTO: New Constitutionalism of Trade Policy and Global Tax Governance (Review of International Political Economy, with Teppo Eskelinen, 2017). The article explored the little-studied interface between international tax and trade governance, showing how trade rules and institutions could be mobilised to protect financial-secrecy arrangements.
- Making Tax Vanish: How the Practices of Consumer Goods MNC RB Show That the International Tax System Is Broken (Oxfam, 2017). This co-authored report for Oxfam GB examined the tax-planning arrangements of the health and hygiene company RB, now Reckitt, and its implications for public revenues in lower-income countries especially in Africa.
- Veroparatiisit: 20 ratkaisua varjotalouteen [Tax Havens: Twenty Solutions for the Shadow Economy] (2008). The global financial crisis brought tax havens and financial secrecy into the political spotlight. Published in Finnish in January 2008, my book appeared as these issues were moving rapidly from the margins of public debate towards its centre.
- Practice: My article Tax-Driven Wealth Chains: A Multiple Case Study of Tax Avoidance in the Finnish Mining Sector, co-authored with Lauri Finér and published in Critical Perspectives on Accounting, built on an earlier Finnwatch investigation. Together, this work helped initiate a sustained Finnish debate about the absence of a mining tax and contributed to the policy environment in which such a tax was introduced in 2024. I have also served as a Finnish contact point for the Tax Justice Network, co-organised one of the international network’s earliest seminars in Helsinki in 2004, and helped organise a major Tax Justice Network conference in Helsinki in 2012.