Is tax evasion a personality trait ? An empirical evaluation of psychological determinants of "tax morale"

L'évasion fiscale est-elle un trait de personnalité ? Une évaluation empirique des déterminants psychologiques de la « morale fiscale »

Nicolas Jacquemet, Stephane Luchini (), Antoine Malézieux and Jason Shogren
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Stephane Luchini: GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: Despite an increasing interest in the non-monetary determinants of tax behaviors (also known as tax morale), the recent literature offers few empirical elements on the link between moral personality characters and tax evasion propensity. However, such measures are necessary to understand the transmission channels of policies targeted at fighting against tax evasion. To fill this gap, this paper reports a lab experiment allowing to observe participants' behaviors of income declaration and psychological measures from the psychometric literature: norm-submission, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, propensity to feel guilt and shame. These measures are combined through a Principal Component Analysis to extract independent factors. Results show that the decision to evade as well as its intensity are very highly related to affective empathy, cognitive empathy and public dimension of morality (measured by norm submission and propensity to feel shame). The propensity to feel guiltiness is, however, without significant effects. More importantly, the explanatory power of these individual morality measures is rather weak. This result challenges the assumption of an intrinsical tax morale and highlights the importance of the institutional context to understand evasion behaviors.

Keywords: Évasion fiscale; Traits de personnalité (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01476519
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Published in Revue Economique, 2016, 68 (5), pp.809-828. ⟨10.3917/reco.pr3.0091⟩

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Working Paper: Is tax evasion a personality trait ? An empirical evaluation of psychological determinants of "tax morale" (2016)
Working Paper: Is tax evasion a personality trait ? An empirical evaluation of psychological determinants of "tax morale" (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01476519

DOI: 10.3917/reco.pr3.0091

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