[2] Dharmapala was born in Sri Lanka, educated in Australia, and settled in the U.S. (he is a naturalized U.S. citizen),[3][4] to pursue a career as an academic economist.
[5] Dharmapala's research on tax havens, often with James R. Hines Jr., is cited as important.
[6][7] In addition to his role as professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Dharmapala is an International Research Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, and has served on the board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association and the National Tax Association.
[8] Dharmapala is sometimes interviewed in the main U.S. financial media on U.S. corporate tax issues.
[9][10][11] Because it is cited as one of the important papers on the research of tax havens,[6][12] the 48 jurisdictions from the Dharmapala-Hines 2009 paper are listed below, per the markings in the paper (♣ & †):[13] 6 of the 7 tax havens that Dharmapala-Hines identified in 2009, but which have never appeared in any OECD list (e.g. marked as †), namely, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland, would become ranked in the world's top ten global tax havens, when academics used quantitative methods to analyse tax havens (i.e. the "OECD havens", plus Singapore and Hong Kong).