Narratives about fiscal policy: Are firm decision-makers' tax preferences driven by redistribution or fiscal consolidation motives?

Laura Arnemann, Philipp Doerrenberg, Fabian Eble, Davud Rostam-Afschar, Johannes Voget, Florian Buhlmann and Christopher Karlsson

No 25-012, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Motivated by the increasing frequency with which business leaders publicly express their views on policy issues and by recent findings on the role of narratives in shaping preferences and behaviors, we investigate ow narratives affect the tax preferences of firm decision-makers. Specifically, using a large-scale survey experiment (N=7,848), we examine how exposure to narratives of redistribution and fiscal consolidation affects firm decision-makers' attitudes toward taxes and fiscal stimulus. We find that framing taxes as payments of due debts increases the preference to pay taxes, whereas framing taxes as funds required to cover undue losses is largely ineffective, except for a notable tendency to favor raising the capital gains tax. We also observe a greater preference to pay taxes when decision-makers agree with the stimulus. Our findings on narratives and the channels affecting tax preferences have implications for fiscal policy communication

Keywords: Tax Preferences; Fiscal Policy; Firm Decision-Makers; Survey Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 H12 H21 H24 H25 H32 H60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/327101/1/1934734918.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:zewdip:327101

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().