Cautionary Tales: Celebrities, the News Media, and Participation in Tax Amnesties

Marcel Garz and Verena Pagels

No 6795, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This study uses an original state-level data set to investigate whether press coverage on trials for tax evasion by celebrities affects the likelihood that other tax payers participate in Germany’s tax amnesty program. To identify the causal effect, we use exogenous variation in the reporting, resulting from disasters and terrorist attacks that coincide with the celebrity trials. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that an increase in news coverage by the amount of an average trial raises participation in the tax amnesty program by approximately 22.5%.

Keywords: news coverage; public trial; self-denunciation; tax evasion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 H26 K34 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-iue
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6795.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cautionary tales: Celebrities, the news media, and participation in tax amnesties (2018)
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:ces:ceswps:_6795

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().