We study extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for tax compliance in the context of a local church tax in Germany. This tax system has historically relied on zero deterrence so that any compliance at baseline is intrinsically motivated. Starting from this zero deterrence baseline, we implement a field experiment that incentivized compliance through deterrence or rewards. Using administrative records of taxes paid and true tax liabilities, we use these treatments to document that intrinsically motivated compliance is substantial, that a significant fraction of it may be driven by duty-to-comply preferences, and that there is no crowd-out between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. (JEL C93, D64, H26, H71, K34, Z12)

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. , we analyze the role of economic and financial openness as well as tax competition while allowing for dynamic adjustment to shocks and period-specific as well as country-specific effects. While openness does not seem to be systematically related to corporate tax rates, our findings suggest that countries compete over statutory tax rates. In contrast, we do not find competition over effective marginal rates. While the short-run impact of tax competition on corporate tax rates seems to be modest, the interplay of tax competition and a sluggish adjustment of tax rates over time implies that permanent shocks to individual countries have substantial long-run effects on equilibrium tax levels in all countries. Terms of use: Documents inJEL Code: H20, H25, H71.

This paper identifies spillovers from law enforcement. Our approach makes use of micro data on compliance with TV license fees that allow us to distinguish between households who were subject to enforcement and those who were not. Using snowfall as an instrument for local inspections, we find a striking response of households to increased enforcement in their vicinity: on average, three detections make one additional household comply with the law. As compliance rises significantly among those who had no exposure to field inspections, our findings establish a substantial externality in enforcement.JEL classification: K42, C23, D83

No abstract

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians'outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeo¤ between allocating their time to political e¤ort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable implication stating that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of electoral competition. We test this implication using a new dataset on outside earnings of members of the German federal assembly. Taking into account the potential endogeneity of measures of political competition that depend on past election outcomes, we …nd that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings.JEL Classi…cation: D72, J45