You've Got Mail: A Randomised Field Experiment on Tax Evasion

Kristina M. Bott (), Alexander Cappelen, Erik Ø. Sørensen () and Bertil Tungodden
Additional contact information
Kristina M. Bott: Christian Michelsen Institute
Erik Ø. Sørensen: Norwegian School of Economics
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Erik Ø. Sørensen

No 2017-051, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15,000 taxpayers in Norway, who were likely to have misreported their foreign income. We find that the inclusion of a moral appeal or a sentence that increases the perceived probability of detection in a letter from the tax authorities almost doubled the average self-reported foreign income. The moral letter mainly works on the intensive margin, while the detection letter mainly works on the extensive margin. We also show that the detection letter has large long-term effects on tax compliance.

Keywords: taxation; tax evasion; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D63 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
Note: MIP
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Bott_C ... 2017_tax-evasion.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: You’ve got mail: A randomised Field experiment on tax evasion (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2017-051

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().