The effect of church tax on church membership

Teemu Lyytikäinen and Torsten Santavirta ()

Journal of Population Economics, 2013, vol. 26, issue 3, 1175-1193

Abstract: In this study, we examine the effect of church tax on the church membership decision using Finnish data. We present both descriptive statistics from an opting-out website and econometric evidence exploiting the panel structure of a large individual-level data set. Our descriptive analysis shows that opting out is concentrated towards the last days of the year, i.e., the last chance to avoid paying church tax for the entire coming year. Our econometric evidence suggests that the average effect of tax incentives for the whole population is both statistically and economically significant. A 1 standard deviation increase in church tax leads to between 0.5 and 1 percentage point decline in the likelihood of church membership. In addition, we find that church membership dropped substantially when a law change made opting out significantly easier. This finding suggests that transaction costs play an important role in the membership decision. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013

Keywords: Church tax; Church membership; Transaction cost; H24; H31; Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00148-012-0431-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The effect of church tax on church membership (2010)
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:spr:jopoec:v:26:y:2013:i:3:p:1175-1193

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-012-0431-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().