On the External Validity of Laboratory Tax Compliance Experiments

James Alm (jalm@tulane.edu), Kim Bloomquist (kim.bloomquist@irs.gov) and Michael McKee
Additional contact information
Kim Bloomquist: Office of Research, U.S. Internal Revenue Service

No 1512, Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics

Abstract: An essential issue for laboratory experiments to inform policy debates is the "external validity" of the experimental results; that is, does behavior in the laboratory apply to behavior that occurs in the naturally occurring world? We examine this issue of external validity in the specific context of laboratory experiments on tax compliance, using two different types of evidence. We find that the behavioral patterns of subjects in the laboratory conform to that of individuals making a similar decision in naturally occurring settings. We also find that the behavioral responses of students are largely the same as non-students in identical experiments.

Keywords: marriage; experimental methods; external validity; tax compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 H2 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-iue, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (93)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul1512.pdf First Version, March 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: ON THE EXTERNAL VALIDITY OF LABORATORY TAX COMPLIANCE EXPERIMENTS (2015)
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:tul:wpaper:1512

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kerui Geng (kgeng@tulane.edu).