Tax Compliance and Enforcement in the Pampas: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By L. Castro, Carlos Scartascini. 2013

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tax evasion is a pervasive problem in many countries. In particular, some developing countries do not collect even half of what they would if taxpayers complied with the written letter of the law. The academic literature has not been oblivious to the need to explain why people pay (or do not pay) taxes. However, the empirical literature has not yet reached consensus. This paper reports the results of a large field experiment that tried to affect compliance by influencing property tax taxpayers' beliefs regarding the levels of enforcement, equity, and fairness of the tax system in a municipality in Argentina. Results indicate that the most effective message was one that stated the actual fines and potential legal consequences taxpayers may face in the case of noncompliance (tax compliance increased by more than 4 percentage points). No average effects are found for the treatments designed to affect beliefs about the equity and fairness of the system. However, the evidence also points out that not every taxpayer updates his or her beliefs in the same direction, as relevant heterogeneous effects are found across the population. The evidence in this paper advances the state of knowledge and may help to reconcile some of the different results in the literature.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/599a52feb98d658c6eb7798bdd8ef8f326f1816f

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Citations in the corpus

Nudging for Tax Compliance: A Meta-Analysis (2019, unknown): “An example of such a nudge is the following one used by (Castro and Scartascini 2015): “Did you know that if you do not”
The Behavioralist as Tax Collector: Using Natural Field Experiments to Enhance Tax Compliance (2017, background): “…et al., 2001; Kleven et al., 2011; Ariel, 2012; Del Carpio, 2013; Carrillo et al., 2014; Gangl et al., 2014; Bott et al., 2014; Pomeranz, 2015; Castro & Scartascini, 2015; Dwenger et al., 2016).1 The great majority of studies have, however, focused on the initial decision to declare…”
Requiem for a Nudge: Framing effects in nudging honesty (2020, background): “…Hernandez et al., 2017; Bott et al., 2019 ) while others either fail to detect a signiﬁcant effect ( Blumenthal et al., 2001; Fellner et al., 2013; Castro and Scartascini, 2015; Kettle et al., 2017; Cranor et al., 2018; Dunning et al., 2019 ) or indicate that interventions may backﬁre ( John and…”
From the Lab to the Field: A Review of Tax Experiments (2016, unknown): “As in the case of Castro and Scartascini (2013), compliance is fully observable thanks to cadastral registries that allow the distinction between taxpayers who comply and those who do not.”
On the External Validity of Laboratory Tax Compliance Experiments (2015, unknown): “One of the first of these field experiments was by Slemrod, Blumenthal, and Christian (2001); more recent examples include Iyer, Reckers, and Sanders (2010), Kleven et al. (2011), Fellner, Sausgruber, and Traxler (2011), Pomeranz (2013), and Castro and Scartascini (2013), and Bott et al. (2013).”