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

By Benno Torgler, Friedrich Schneider. Social Science Research Network, 2006

403 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9b680736d54160dee6e9a2ef4f0ce237e0a6d7c

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Citations in the corpus

Tax knowledge and tax compliance determinants in self assessment system in Malaysia (2010, methodology): “In 2007, using the same method as Torgler and Schneider (2005), Torgler analysed the level of tax morale in transition countries and found that tax morale in East Germany was quite high, exceeding the tax morale in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in both years.”
Tax morale and public spending inefficiency (2011, background): “17 Similarly, Torgler (2005b), Alm and Torgler (2006), and Torgler and Schneider (2007) observe a significant negative correlation between tax morale and a shadow economy.”
Green Returns to Education: Does Schooling Contribute to Pro-Environmental Behaviours? Evidence from Thailand (2017, background): “The insignificant relationship between education and willingness to pay for environmental tax found in our study thus represents ambivalent relations between education level and tax morale (Torgler and Schneider, 2007).”
Gender and Public Attitudes Toward Corruption and Tax Evasion (2010, neutral): “As in the previous literature (Swamy et al., 2001; Torgler, 2007; Torgler and Schneider, 2007), we find that women are less likely to approve of corruption and tax evasion.”
The influence of religiosity on taxpayers’ compliance attitudes: Empirical evidence from a mixed-methods study in Malaysia (2014, background): “…countries and found a strong impact of religiosity on tax morale in Germany (Feld and Torgler, 2007, p. 29), European countries except for Spain (Torgler and Schneider, 2007, p. 466), the USA and Turkey (Torgler, Demir, Macintyre and Schaffner, 2008, p. 335) and the USA (Torgler, 2012, p. 277).”
The effect of tax enforcement on tax morale (2013, neutral): “To the best of our knowledge the only contributions that use an objective measure of the probability of being audited are Torgler (2005) and Torgler and Schneider (2007) but they do not find any significant effect.3 The outline of the paper is as follows.”