Making Visible the Invisible: Open Research to Expose Global Profit Shifting, Inequality and Corporate Power 

Making Visible the Invisible:

Open Research to Expose Global Profit Shifting, Inequality and Corporate Power

Presenter: Lakshmi Menon

PhD. Researcher, Quantitative Social Science, University College Dublin

Abstract

How can open research challenge corporate secrecy? This lightning talk introduces Democracy Challenged, a European Research Council funded project at University College Dublin that transforms complex corporate and financial data into public-facing tools for transparency and accountability. Our research investigates how multinational tech and pharmaceutical firms shift profits across jurisdictions through legal loopholes, shell companies, and cross-border intellectual property licensing. These strategies reduce tax liabilities, erode public finances, and deepen inequality, yet they are hidden in dense disclosures that are inaccessible to most audiences.

By applying FAIR and open research principles, we make these practices visible. Key outputs will include an annotated, open corpus of SEC 10-K filings focused on tax disclosures of S&P 500 companies, interactive corporate ownership maps showing subsidiary and IP flows, public explainers and blog posts for journalists and policymakers, and open-source code for reproducibility.

Our interdisciplinary team brings together UCD’s Aidan Regan, professor of political economy; Oscar Barrera and Rafael Quintero, senior researchers; and PhD researchers Linus Zechlin and Lakshmi Menon. Collectively, we draw on economics, political science, law, and data science. By integrating political economy, legal analysis, and computational text analysis, we deliver a scalable model of open research that strengthens democratic oversight and ensures long-term preservation of outputs in trusted repositories such as the Digital Repository of Ireland and Zenodo.

About

Lakshmi Menon is a PhD researcher in Quantitative Social Science at University College Dublin, funded by a European Research Council scholarship. With a background in economics and data science, her research focuses on multinational enterprises (MNEs), examining profit shifting, global wealth chains, and patent transaction networks. She combines econometrics, network analysis, and computational text methods to investigate how MNEs use subsidiaries, intellectual property, and cross-border transactions to minimise tax liabilities and shape global inequality.

As part of the Democracy Challenged project, Lakshmi works in an interdisciplinary team of economists, political scientists, lawyers, and data scientists to transform complex corporate data into open, public-facing resources that strengthen transparency and democratic oversight.