How to Enforce Tax Compliance: Moral Appeals, Social Information or Legal Threats?

Research report (imported) 2009 - Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Authors
Traxler, Christian
Departments
Summary
How should modern society fight the evasion of taxes and fees? The economic model suggests that we should set proper incentives by threatening with (and implementing) fines and legal sanctions. But does this approach work? Could we design alternative and probably more successful policies that rely on moral appeals and social norms? A natural field experiment of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in the domain of TV license fee evasion tries to answer these questions.

For the full text, see the German version.

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