In a real-effort laboratory experiment to manipulate evasion opportunities, we study whether the moral evaluation of tax evasion is subject to a self-serving bias. We find that tax morale is egoistically biased: Subjects with the opportunity to evade taxes judge tax evasion as less unethical as...

Citizen tax compliance significantly dictates governmental fiscal capacities. Recognizing this, understanding the determinants of tax compliance remains paramount. While existing literature frequently isolates and tests individual determinants such as audit likelihood, penalty structures, tax...

Previous research argues that law expresses social values and could, therefore, influence individual behavior independently of enforcement and penalization. Using three laboratory experiments on tax avoidance and evasion, we study how legality affects individuals' decisions. We find that,...

In this paper, we improve upon the Pissarides-Weber (PW) method for estimating tax evasion among the self-employed by utilizing unique register-based consumption measures from the Swedish and Finnish mandatory registers for pleasure boats. Our main contributions are twofold: i) The PW method...

This paper estimates income tax underreporting for the case of Germany, by income category and along the income distribution. Comparing weighted samples of survey and tax data, we find patterns that are in line with the literature: Average income from self-employment and from rent and lease in...

Tax evasion is associated with high social and fiscal costs. To address these, many governments employ behavioral interventions given their low implementation costs and high potential efficiency. Although many studies report positive effects of behavioral interventions to combat tax evasion, the...

Using new survey and experimental data for a representative sample of the German population, we study preferences for tax simplification. The general wisdom seems to suggest that most tax systems are overly complex and that tax simplification is generally desirable. Consistent with this general...

Firms are facing progressively more stringent tax disclosure requirements. In this paper, we examine whether increased qualitative tax transparency leads to intended outcomes using, as an exogenous shock, the 2016 UK reform that mandated the disclosure of a tax strategy for firms above a certain...

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...