Nudging for tax compliance: A meta-analysis

Taxpayer nudges – behavioral interventions that aim to increase tax compliance without changing the underlying economic incentives of taxpayers – are used increasingly by governments because of their potential cost-effectiveness in raising tax revenue. We collect about a thousand treatment effect estimates from over 40 randomized controlled trials, and in a metaanalytical framework show that non-deterrence nudges – interventions pointing to elements of individual tax morale – are on average ineffective in curbing tax evasion, while deterrence nudges – interventions emphasizing traditional determinants of compliance such as audit probabilities and penalty rates – are potent catalysts of compliance. These effects are, however, fairly small in magnitude. Deterrence nudges increase the probability of compliance by only 1.5-2.5 percentage points more than non-deterrence nudges, while the effects are likely to be bound to the short-run, and are somewhat inflated by selective reporting of results

Political Narratives and the US Partisan Gender Gap

Social scientists have devoted considerable research effort to investigate the determinants of the Partisan Gender Gap (PGG), whereby US women (men) tend to exhibit more liberal (conservative) political preferences over time. Results of a survey experiment run during the COVID-19 emergency and involving 3,086 US residents show that exposing subjects to alternative narratives on the causes of the pandemic increases the PGG: relative to a baseline treatment in which no narrative manipulation is implemented, exposing subjects to either the Lab narrative (claiming that COVID-19 was caused by a lab accident in Wuhan) or the Nature narrative (according to which COVID-19 originated in the wildlife) makes women more liberal. The polarization effect documented in our experiment is magnified by the political orientation of participants' state of residence: the largest PGG effect is between men residing in Republican-leaning states and women living in Democratic-leaning states.JEL Classification: J16, D83, C83, C99, P16, D72

Trust in the Helth System and Covid-19 Treatment

COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe at an exponential speed, infecting millions and overwhelming even the most prepared healthcare systems. Concerns are looming that the healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are mostly unprepared to combat the virus because of limited resources. The problems in LMICs are exacerbated by the fact that citizens in these countries generally exhibit low trust in the healthcare system because of its low quality, which could trigger a number of uncooperative behaviors. In this paper, we focus on one such behavior and investigate the relationship between trust in the healthcare system and the probability of potential treatment-seeking behavior upon the appearance of the first symptoms of COVID-19. First, we provide motivating evidence from a unique national online survey administered in Armenia–a post-Soviet LMIC country. We then present results from a large-scale survey experiment in Armenia that provides causal evidence supporting the investigated relationship. Our main finding is that a more trustworthy healthcare system enhances the probability of potential treatment-seeking behavior when observing the initial symptoms

Political Narratives and the US Partisan Gender Gap

Social scientists have devoted considerable research effort to investigate the determinants of the Partisan Gender Gap (PGG), whereby US women (men) tend to exhibit more liberal (conservative) political preferences over time. Results of a survey experiment run during the COVID-19 emergency and involving 3,086 US residents show that exposing subjects to alternative narratives on the causes of the pandemic increases the PGG: relative to a baseline treatment in which no narrative manipulation is implemented, exposing subjects to either the Lab narrative (claiming that COVID-19 was caused by a lab accident in Wuhan) or the Nature narrative (according to which COVID-19 originated in the wildlife) makes women more liberal. The polarization effect documented in our experiment is magnified by the political orientation of participants' state of residence: the largest PGG effect is between men residing in Republican-leaning states and women living in Democratic-leaning states

A survey experiment on information, taxpayer preferences, and perceived adequacy of the tax burden

We report results of a survey experiment aimed at testing whether eliciting taxpayer preferences on how to allocate the collected taxes over national public goods as well as providing information about the composition of the public expenditure influence the tax rate that taxpayers consider adequate to pay. We find that information exerts no effects on the level of the adequate tax rate. However, taxpayers are willing to accept a higher tax burden when they express their preferences on how to use tax revenues to finance public goods and services

Charitable giving, social capital, and positional concerns

Research on the effects of positional concerns on individuals’ attitudes and behavior in certain policy-relevant areas is lacking. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between positional concerns, charitable giving, and social capital. We use data from the “Caucasus Barometer” survey administered in three post-Soviet transition economies: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Our analysis proceeds in two phases. First, controlling for absolute income and other individual and household characteristics, we show an association between positional concerns and charitable giving as well as between positional concerns and social capital. Second, we use an instrumental variable model that uses heteroskedasticity-based instruments generated through Lewbel's method to provide supporting evidence of the causal impact of positional concerns on the outcome variables of interest. We find that the relative deprivation of a household can have negative impacts on its members’ charitable giving and social capital

Context-dependent cheating: experimental evidence from 16 countries

Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries

Reference group income and subjective well-being: empirical evidence from low-income transition economies

This paper aims at studying the connection between reference group income and life satisfaction in the three republics of the South Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. I illustrate that in low-income transition economies individuals make not only upward comparisons, decreasing their subjective well-being if the reference group members are richer than they are, but also downward comparisons, enhancing their subjective well-being if the reference group members are poorer. This result contradicts Duesenberry’s idea that comparisons are mostly upward

Nudging for tax compliance: A meta-analysis

Taxpayer nudges – behavioral interventions that aim to increase tax compliance without changing the underlying economic incentives of taxpayers – are used increasingly by governments because of their potential cost-effectiveness in raising tax revenue. We collect about a thousand treatment effect estimates from over 40 randomized controlled trials, and in a metaanalytical framework show that non-deterrence nudges – interventions pointing to elements of individual tax morale – are on average ineffective in curbing tax evasion, while deterrence nudges – interventions emphasizing traditional determinants of compliance such as audit probabilities and penalty rates – are potent catalysts of compliance. These effects are, however, fairly small in magnitude. Deterrence nudges increase the probability of compliance by only 1.5-2.5 percentage points more than non-deterrence nudges, while the effects are likely to be bound to the short-run, and are somewhat inflated by selective reporting of results