IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/20.html

The effect of church tax on church membership

Author

Listed:
  • Lyytikäinen, Teemu
  • Santavirta, Torsten

Abstract

Abstract In this study we examine the effect of church tax on the church membership decision using Finnish data. We present both descriptive statistics from an opting-out website and econometric evidence exploiting the panel structure of a large individual-level data set. Our descriptive analysis shows that opting-out is concentrated towards the last days of the year, i.e., the last chance to avoid paying church tax for the entire coming year. Our econometric evidence suggests however, that the average effect of tax incentives in the whole population is very small in magnitude, while being statistically significant. The price elasticity of church membership is roughly -0.01. In addition, we find that church membership dropped substantially when a law change made opting-out significantly easier. This finding suggests that transaction costs play an important role in the membership decision.

Suggested Citation

  • Lyytikäinen, Teemu & Santavirta, Torsten, 2010. "The effect of church tax on church membership," Working Papers 20, VATT Institute for Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:fer:wpaper:20
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/148759
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. The Demand Curve for Religion
      by Daniel Hamermesh in Freakonomics on 2012-11-20 21:05:12

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Henrik-Alexander Schubert & Vegard Skirbekk & Jessica Nisén, 2024. "Secularization and low fertility: how declining church membership changes couples and their childbearing," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2024-040, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    2. Bittschi, Benjamin & Borgloh, Sarah & Wigger, Berthold, 2015. "Secularization, tax policy and prosocial behavior," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 113065, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    3. Eerola, Essi & Lyytikäinen, Teemu, 2015. "On the role of public price information in housing markets," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 74-84.
    4. Benjamin Bittschi & Sarah Borgloh & Berthold U. Wigger, 2020. "Philanthropy in a Secular Society," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 176(4), pages 640-664.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fer:wpaper:20. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anita Niskanen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vatttfi.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.