In recent years much research has investigated whether values, social norms, and attitudes differ across countries and whether these differences have measurable effects on economic behavior. One area in which such studies are particularly relevant is tax compliance, given both the noted differences across countries in their levels of tax compliance and the marked inability of standard economic models of taxpayer compliance to explain these differences. In the face of these difficulties, many researchers have suggested that the intrinsic motivation for individuals to pay taxes – what is sometimes termed their “tax morale” – differs across countries. However, isolating the reasons for these differences in tax morale is notoriously difficult. In a common approach, studies sometimes referred to as “cultural studies” have often relied upon controlled laboratory experiments conducted in different countries because such experiments can be set up with identical experimental protocols to allow cultural effects to be isolated. In this paper we first analyze a cross-section of individuals in Spain and the United States using the World Values Survey (WVS). In line with previous experiments, our findings indicate a significantly higher tax morale in the United States than in Spain, controlling in a multivariate analysis for additional variables. We then extend our multivariate analysis to include 14 European countries in the estimations. Our results again indicate that the United States has the highest tax morale across all countries, followed by Austria and Switzerland. We also find a strong negative correlation between the size of shadow economy and the degree of tax morale in those countries.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) in its series CREMA Working Paper Series with number
2004-14.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion H73 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - Interjurisdictional Differentials and Their Effects
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.