Towards Integrating Antecedents of Voluntary Tax Compliance

This thesis explores the integrative effect of social psychological factors among themselves as well as with economic deterrent factors in stimulating voluntary tax compliance, contributing to the tax compliance literature a theoretically relevant integrative approach that bridges between social psychological and economic deterrence approaches. It also contributes to the ecological validity of research on tax compliance behavior by comparing samples of two tax environments that are extremely unlike—one from a developing country (i.e. Ethiopia) and another from a developed country (i.e. the US). Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter that seeks to introduce the thesis and summarize research on voluntary tax compliance, highlighting the need to integrate antecedents of voluntary tax compliance. Each of the three empirical chapters contributes to theoretical and empirical developments of the tax compliance literature. Chapter 2 explores the moderating roles of two (i.e. coercive and legitimate) types of power wielded by the tax authority in the relationship between procedural justice and voluntary tax compliance as mediated by (cognition-based) trust in the authority. This study finds support for the prediction that high (but not low) coercive and low (but not high) legitimate power of the tax authority moderate the positive relationship between procedural justice and voluntary tax compliance. Only procedural justice by legitimate power inter

Make me want to pay! A three-way interaction between procedural justice, distributive justice, and power on voluntary tax compliance

Tax compliance involves a decision where personal benefits come at the expense of society and its members. We explored the roles of procedural and distributive justice and citizens’ perceptions of the tax authority’s power in stimulating voluntary tax compliance. Distributive and procedural justice have often (but not always) been shown to interact in such a way that high distributive justice or high procedural justice is sufficient to predict positive responses to authorities and the social collective they represent. We examined whether this interaction predicts voluntary (but not enforced) tax compliance, in particular among citizens who perceive the tax authority’s power as high (vs. low). The results of two field studies among Ethiopian (Study 1) and United States (Study 2) taxpayers supported our pre