Tax Morale and Tax Compliance from the Firm's Perspective

James Alm () and Chandler McClellan

No 1211, Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Much recent research has investigated whether values, social norms, and attitudes differ across countries and whether these differences have measurable effects on economic behavior. One area in which such studies are particularly relevant is tax compliance, and a factor that has been suggested as a factor in compliance behavior is "tax morale", or the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes. However, all of this work on tax morale has focused on individuals, not on firms. In this paper, we use information from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey and also from the World Enterprise Survey for a wide range of countries over several years of data to examine a firm's tax morale and the subsequent impact on firm tax compliance. We use these data first to examine a firm's perception of taxes as an obstacle to doing business. Importantly, once we control for the various factors that affect this perception, what is left is a measure that we believe is a measure of the firm's tax morale, as a driver of the firm's view of the appropriateness of cheating on taxes. With this measure of tax morale, we are then able to examine in a second stage estimation how our estimated firm tax morale affects the compliance decisions of the firm. Ultimately, our results allow us to identify factors that allow the government to improve its efforts to increase firm tax compliance.

Keywords: tax evasion; tax morale; behavioral economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H26 H32 H73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2012-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-iue and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

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http://repec.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul1211.pdf First Version, 2012 (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: Tax Morale and Tax Compliance from the Firm's Perspective (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tul:wpaper:1211

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