Palan's major empirical work is the area of offshore financial centres and tax havens.
[3] In January 2016, Palan acted as an advisor to the BBC's documentary, Britain’s Trillion Pound Paradise – Inside Cayman.
[4] In May 2017, Palan also featured in the documentary, "The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire" on the U.K.'s relationships with tax havens.
[5] As a student, Palan attended the London School of Economics, where he produced his PhD thesis Patterns of non-governmental interactions as a bridge between the structuralist theory of the state and the study of international relations.
[1] Palan has authored and edited a number of books, including Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories (edited, Routledge, 2000), The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Cornell University Press, 2003), The Imagined Economies of Globalisation (with Angus Cameron, Sage, 2004) and Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (with Richard Murphy, Christian Chavagneux, Cornell University Press, 2010).