We present the first randomized survey experiment in the context of tax compliance to assess the role of social norms and reciprocity for intrinsic tax morale. We find that participants in a reciprocity treatment have significantly higher tax morale than those in a social-norm treatment. This...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system...

The elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is often interpreted as a sufficient statistic to assess the welfare costs of taxation. Building on the conceptual framework of Chetty (2009), we show that this assertion does no longer hold for tax systems with deduction possibilities if (i) deductions...

We study the effect of inflowing remittances - a major source of capital for many countries - on tax-revenues and tax-policy. Instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil-price interacted with a country's distance to oil-producing countries, we find that remittances have a large positive...

The standard labor-supply literature typically assumes that the labor supply response to wage increases is the same as that for equivalent wage decreases. However, evidence from the behavioral-economics literature suggests that people are loss averse and thus perceive losses differently than...

We study tax compliance in Slovenia using data generated in a field experiment. Small accounting companies were randomly assigned to an untreated control group and two treatment groups. Companies in the first treatment group received a letter that highlighted the importance of paying taxes and...

German municipalities have substantial autonomy in setting taxes on two distinct tax bases: business profits and property values. We use this setting and a two-step approach to explore whether implemented tax policy is consistent with the seminal inverse-elasticity rule. First, we estimate the...

This paper examines whether risk-taking in a lottery depends on the opportunity to respond to the lottery outcome through additional labor effort and/or tax evasion. Previous empirical attempts to answer this question face identification issues due to self selection into jobs that facilitate tax...

Using panel data on the full population of corporate tax returns of Armenian firms, we study the behavioral response of firms to three size-dependent regulations. We find: i) a strong response to an accounting notch where International Financial Reporting Standards become mandatory; ii) a...

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities. Administrative linked employer-employee data allows estimating heterogeneous worker and firm effects. We set up a general theoretical framework showing that corporate taxes can have a...