Tax evasion costs governments worldwide trillions of U.S. dollars. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of tax evasion behavior is needed to ensure that tax evasion is combatted effectively. Using different controlled and incentivized experiments, we analyze whether taxpayers are more willing to...

Emotions have a strong impact on our everyday life, including our mental health, sleep pattern, overall well-being, and judgment and decision making. Our paper is the first study to show that incidental emotions, i.e., emotions not related to the actual choice problem, influence the compliance...

Fungibility of money is a central assumption in the theory of consumer choice: any unit of money is substitutable for another. This implies that the composition of income or wealth is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many...

This paper studies the role of beliefs about own performance or appearance for compliance at the customs. In an experiment in which underreporting has a higher expected payoff than truthful reporting we find: a large share, about 15-20 percent of the subjects, is more compliant if they have...

Public policies that intervene or restrict consumer choices for the benefit of the society are often controversial. For instance, the compliance rate of COVID-19 pandemic social distancing rules varied dramatically across cities and states, and these policies even backfired among some consumers...

Using comprehensive high-frequency state and local sales tax data, we show that shopping behavior responds strongly to changes in sales tax rates. Even though sales taxes are not observed in posted prices and have a wide range of rates and exemptions, consumers adjust in many dimensions. They...

Social exclusion is usually considered in relation to the world of work. Here, we consider it in relation to consumption. To do this, we introduce the notion of the ‘excluded consumer’. In order to understand who defines themselves as excluded from normal consumption practices and how, the...

We test the equivalence of tax-inclusive and tax-exclusive prices through a series of experiments that differ only in their handling of the tax. Subjects receive a cash budget and decide how much to keep and how much to spend on various attractively priced goods. Subjects spend significantly...

We test the equivalence of tax-inclusive and tax-exclusive prices through a series of experiments that differ only in their handling of the tax. Subjects receive a cash budget and decide how much to keep and how much to spend on various attractively priced goods. Subjects spend significantly...

Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...