Benno Torgler

Speaking to Theorists and Searching for Facts: Tax Morale and Tax Compliance in Experiments

A significant body of research has been accumulated concerning tax morale and tax compliance. This paper takes a stroll through the experimental findings, focussing on personal income. After briefly discussing the traditional topic of deterrence the main focus is on the social and institutional factors which until now have received only limited attention. Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Tax Morale and Conditional Cooperation

Why so many people pay their taxes, although fines and audit probability are low, has become a central question in the tax compliance literature. A homo economicus, with a more refined motivation structure, helps us to shed light on this puzzle. This paper provides empirical evidence for the relevance of conditional cooperation, using survey data from 30 West and East European countries. We find a high correlation between perceived tax evasion and tax morale. The results remain robust after exploiting endogeneity and conducting several robustness tests. We also observe a strong positive correlation between institutional quality and tax morale.

What Shapes Attitudes Toward Paying Taxes? Evidence from Multicultural European Countries

Considerable evidence suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance several researchers have argued that citizens’ attitudes toward paying taxes defined as tax morale helps to explain the high degree of tax compliance. However, most studies have treated tax morale as a black box without discussing which factors shape it. Additionally, the tax compliance literature provides little empirical research that investigates attitudes toward paying taxes in Europe. Thus, this paper is unique in its examination of citizen tax morale within three multicultural European countries, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain, a choice that allows far more detailed examination of the impact of culture and institutions using datasets from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey.

Tax Morale, Rule-Governed Behaviour and Trust

This paper outlines the relevance of rules to understand tax morale. It tries to find explanations why taxpayers obey, rather than simply evade taxes. The development of a typology of taxpayers shows that the same tax rules can have different compliance effects. Furthermore, the paper provides evidence with two data sets, the World Values Survey and the Taxpayers Opinion Survey that trust in public officials and the legal system have a significant positive effect on tax morale.

Societal Institutions and Tax Effort in Developing Countries

The main theme of this paper is that a more legitimate and responsive state appears to be an essential precondition for a more adequate level of tax effort in developing countries. The most important contribution of this paper is to extend the conventional model of tax effort by showing that not only do supply factors matter, but that societal institutions (demand factors) also determine tax effort to a significant extent.

Tax Effort in Developing Countries and High Income Countries: The Impact of Corruption, Voice and Accountability

In this paper we argue that a more legitimate and responsive state is an essential factor for a more adequate level of tax effort in developing countries and high income countries. While at first glance giving such advice to poor countries seeking to increase their tax ratios may not seem more helpful than telling them to find oil, it is presumably more feasible for people to improve their governing institutions than to rearrange nature’s bounty. Improving corruption, voice and accountability may not take longer nor be necessarily more difficult than changing the opportunities for tax handles and economic structure. The paper also shows that high income countries have also the potential of improving their tax performance through improving their institutions. The key contribution of this paper is to extend the conventional model of tax effort by showing that not only do supply factors matter, but that demand factors such as corruption, voice and accountability also determine tax effort to a significant extent.

To evade taxes or not to evade: that is the question

Abstract Tax evasion seems to be a growing problem in almost all countries. The paper analyses the possibilities and limitations of game-theoretical aspects to analyse tax evasion. However, empirical findings indicate that most people pay more taxes than the traditional economic approach would predict. Thus, it might be important to go a step back and analyse tax morale, the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, as endogenous variable. With data from the World Values Survey (WVS), choosing Canada, strong evidence has been found that trust in government, pride, and religiosity have a systematic positive influence on tax morale. This effect tends to persist even after controlling for age, income, education, gender, marital status, employment status.

Tax Morale in Transition Countries

This article tries to reduce the lack of tax compliance research analysing tax morale in transition countries. The empirical analysis using tax morale as a dependent variable working with World Values Survey data indicates that there is a significantly higher tax morale in Central and Eastern European than in former Soviet Union countries. This difference has increased during the transition process. Furthermore, the article shows that factors such as trust in the legal system and the government have a significant positive effect on tax morale in transition economies.

Russian attitudes toward paying taxes – before, during, and after the transition

This paper examines citizens’ attitudes toward paying taxes – what is sometimes termed their “tax morale”, or the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes – focusing on the experience of individuals in the Russian Federation. A unique aspect of our analysis is our ability to study tax morale before (1991), during (1995), and shortly after (1999) the transition of the Russian economy from a centrally planned economy to one based on market reliance. Our empirical analysis uses data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey. The results show decay in tax morale in the first four years of the transition from 1991 to 1995, and a small recovery in 1999. These results are consistent with the relevance of social norms in tax compliance, where the widespread perception of tax evasion and of a corrupt and inefficient state led initially to a decline of tax morale. However, the results also suggest that the restoration of a higher level of trust in the state, after some progress in the transition to a market economy, positively influenced tax morale. Using disaggregated data for Russian regions, we also find significant regional differences in tax morale, reflecting the degree of trust different regions have toward Moscow’s institutions and policies.

What shapes player performance in soccer? Empirical findings from a panel analysis

In this article, we investigate the pay–performance relationship of soccer players using individual data from eight seasons of the German soccer league Bundesliga. We find a nonlinear pay–performance relationship, indicating that salary does indeed affect individual performance. The results further show that player performance is affected not only by absolute income level but also by relative income position. An additional analysis of the performance impact of team effects provides evidence of a direct impact of team-mate attributes on individual player performance.