Is tax evasion a personality trait ? An empirical evaluation of psychological determinants of "tax morale"[L'évasion fiscale est-elle un trait de personnalité ? Une évaluation empirique des déterminants psychologiques de la « morale fiscale »]

Despite an increasing interest in the non-monetary determinants of tax behaviors (also known as tax morale), the recent literature offers few empirical elements on the link between moral personality characters and tax evasion propensity. However, such measures are necessary to understand the transmission channels of policies targeted at fighting against tax evasion. To fill this gap, this paper reports a lab experiment allowing to observe participants' behaviors of income declaration and psychological measures from the psychometric literature: norm-submission, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, propensity to feel guilt and shame. These measures are combined through a Principal Component Analysis to extract independent factors. Results show that the decision to evade as well as its intensity are very highly related to affective empathy, cognitive empathy and public dimension of morality (measured by norm submission and propensity to feel shame). The propensity to feel guiltiness is, however, without significant effects. More importantly, the explanatory power of these individual morality measures is rather weak. This result challenges the assumption of an intrinsical tax morale and highlights the importance of the institutional context to understand evasion behaviors.