Tax Morale and the Role of Social Norms and Reciprocity: Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment

Philipp Doerrenberg and Andreas Peichl

No 11714, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We present the first randomized survey experiment in the context of tax compliance to assess the role of social norms and reciprocity for intrinsic tax morale. We find that participants in a social-norm treatment have lower tax morale relative to a control group while participants in a reciprocity treatment have significantly higher tax morale than those in the social-norm group. This suggests that a potential backfire effect of social norms is outweighed if the consequences of violating the social norm are made salient. We further document the anatomy of intrinsic motivations for tax compliance and present first evidence that previously found gender effects in tax morale are not driven by differences in risk preferences.

Keywords: social norms; tax morale; intrinsic motivations; tax evasion; tax compliance; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 H20 H32 H50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-iue, nep-pbe, nep-pub and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published - published in: FinanzArchiv (FA), 2022, 78 (1), 44-86

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Related works:
Journal Article: Tax Morale and the Role of Social Norms and Reciprocity - Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment (2022)
Working Paper: Tax Morale and the Role of Social Norms and Reciprocity. Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment (2018)
Working Paper: Tax morale and the role of social norms and reciprocity - Evidence from a randomized survey experiment (2017)
Working Paper: Tax morale and the role of social norms and reciprocity: Evidence from a randomized survey experiment (2017)
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