Appeals to Social Norms and Taxpayer Compliance

James Alm (), William Schulze (), Carrie Bose () and Jubo Yan
Additional contact information
William Schulze: Cornell University
Carrie Bose: Fors Marsh Group

No 1902, Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We use laboratory experiments to examine the impact of appeals to social norms on the compliance decisions of individuals. We test the effects of two main types of social norms: "descriptive norms", or the type of behavior that is typical or most frequently enacted, and "injunctive norms", or the type of behavior that "constitutes morally approved and disapproved conduct". In addition, for injunctive norms we introduce approval-framed and disapprovalframed injunctive norm messages. Our results indicate that normative appeals generally have a modest and positive impact on tax compliance, if not always statistically significant. The magnitude of both approval- and disapproval-framed injunctive norm messages is an increase of around 2 percent in reported taxes.

Keywords: Tax compliance; social norms; experimental economics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 H2 H26 H3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-iue and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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http://repec.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul1902.pdf First Version, April 2019 (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: Appeals to Social Norms and Taxpayer Compliance (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tul:wpaper:1902

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