Shaming tax delinquents

By Ricardo Perez-Truglia, U. Troiano. Journal of Public Economics, 2015

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many federal and local governments rely on shaming penalties to achieve policy goals, but little is known about whether these penalties work as intended. Shaming penalties may be ineffective or may backfire by crowding-out intrinsic motivation. In this paper, we measure the effects of shaming penalties in the collection of tax delinquencies. We sent letters to 34,344 tax delinquents who owed half a billion dollars in three U.S. states. We randomized some of the information contained in the letter to vary the salience of financial and shaming penalties. We then measure how the salience of these penalties affected subsequent re-payment rates. We find that increasing the salience of financial and shaming penalties reduces tax delinquency. The effects of shaming penalties are only significant for individuals with smaller debts. We show that publishing lists with tax delinquents does not seem to affect the decision to pay through peer comparisons of the amount owed.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25337a90696775b567006aea225bdcd9c95e1a19

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Ingar K. Haaland
2. Johannes Wohlfart
3. Christopher Roth

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Ingar K. Haaland
2. Johannes Wohlfart
3. Christopher Roth

In Safety Research

1. Ingar K. Haaland
2. Johannes Wohlfart
3. Christopher Roth

Citations in the corpus

• Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, background): “Similarly, Perez-Truglia and Troiano (2018) examine how information on financial penalties, shaming penalties, and peer comparisons shape tax delinquents’ future repayment rates.”
• Nudging for Tax Compliance: A Meta-Analysis (2019, unknown): “According to Pomeranz and Vila-Belda (2019), it may well be that nudges implemented by tax authorities are more effective in shifting perceptions of audit probabilities than perceptions of social norms.”