Appeals to Social Norms and Taxpayer Compliance
James Alm (),
William D. Schulze,
Carrie von Bose and
Jubo Yan
Southern Economic Journal, 2019, vol. 86, issue 2, 638-666
Abstract:
We use laboratory experiments to examine the impact of appeals to social norms on the compliance decisions of individuals. We test the effects of two main types of social norms: “descriptive norms,” or the type of behavior that is typical or most frequently enacted, and “injunctive norms,” or the type of behavior that “constitutes morally approved and disapproved conduct”. In addition, for injunctive norms, we introduce approval‐framed and disapproval‐framed injunctive norm messages. Our results indicate that normative appeals generally have a modest and positive impact on tax compliance, if not always statistically significant. The magnitude of both approval‐ and disapproval‐framed injunctive norm messages is an increase of around 2% in reported taxes.
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12374
Related works:
Working Paper: Appeals to Social Norms and Taxpayer Compliance (2019) 
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:wly:soecon:v:86:y:2019:i:2:p:638-666
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().