Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending

Abstract

Advances in Field Experiments, RIDGE, IIPF, Journees LAGV, and NOVAFRICA. This project was reviewed and approved in advance by the Institutional Review Board at The University of Texas at Dallas. The field experiment was pre-registered in the AEA RCT Registry (#0007483). To prevent contamination of the subject pool (e.g., that subjects could read about the hypotheses being tested), we posted the RCT pre-registration immediately after the deadline to file a protest had passed, but before conducting any analysis of the data. After the study is accepted for publication, we will share all the code and data through a public repository. Xinmei Yang and Miriam Malament provided superb research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Tax Morality and the Intentions of Households and Business Entities to Participate in the Shadow Economy

“…A social experiment demonstrates that individuals are more likely to pay taxes if they believe that government services funded by those taxes will bring them greater personal benefits. In this case, households with children attending public schools, having learned that a greater proportion of property tax revenues fund educational institutions, were less likely to engage in tax evasion (Giaccobasso, 2023). Tax morality refers to the intrinsic motivation of taxpayers in relation to paying taxes.…”

Transparency and Policy Competition: Experimental Evidence from German Citizens and Politicians

“…There is, however, mounting evidence from various countries that the electorate is largely misinformed about policy outcomes in many areas (e.g., Gilens, 2001;Alesina et al, 2020;Nyhan, 2020;Haaland et al, forthcoming). Misperceptions exist not only for policy outcomes at the national level and in comparison to other countries (e.g., Fehr et al, 2022), but also for outcomes at subnational levels, regarding, e.g., costs of living across US cities (Giaccobasso et al, 2022), property tax rates across US school districts (Bottan and Perez-Truglia, 2022), or local tax rates, COVID-19 infection rates, and regional income levels in Spain (Foremny, 2022;Foremny et al, 2020;Balcells et al, 2015). These information frictions limit the extent to which horizontal competition among political representatives can improve welfare.…”