IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mhr/finarc/urnsici0015-2218(201312)694_412maosto_2.0.tx_2-l.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Mental Accounting of Self-Employed Taxpayers: On the Mental Segregation of the Net Income and the Tax Due

Author

Listed:
  • Stephan Muehlbacher
  • Erich Kirchler

Abstract

Mental accounting practices of self-employed taxpayers are investigated in two studies. Interviews (N=30) revealed that perceptions of the tax due differ widely. While a majority mentally segregate the tax component from their net income, others claim ownership of the gross income as a whole and consequently experience a loss when paying taxes. A survey (N=172) shows that mental segregation is associated with age, income, and number of employees, and is further related to attitudes towards taxes and to self-reported compliance. It is concluded that especially inexperienced self-employed should be trained in favorable mental tax accounting practices to foster voluntary compliance.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephan Muehlbacher & Erich Kirchler, 2013. "Mental Accounting of Self-Employed Taxpayers: On the Mental Segregation of the Net Income and the Tax Due," FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 69(4), pages 412-438, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:mhr:finarc:urn:sici:0015-2218(201312)69:4_412:maosto_2.0.tx_2-l
    DOI: 10.1628/001522108X675656
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/mental-accounting-of-self-employed-taxpayers-on-the-mental-segregation-of-the-net-income-and-the-tax-due-101628001522113x675656
    Download Restriction: Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1628/001522108X675656?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Adams, Caroline & Webley, Paul, 2001. "Small business owners' attitudes on VAT compliance in the UK," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 195-216, April.
    2. Antonides, Gerrit & Manon de Groot, I. & Fred van Raaij, W., 2011. "Mental budgeting and the management of household finance," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 32(4), pages 546-555, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Fábio Pereira Silva & Reinaldo Guerreiro & Eduardo Flores, 2019. "Voluntary versus enforced tax compliance: the slippery slope framework in the Brazilian context," International Review of Economics, Springer;Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS), vol. 66(2), pages 147-180, June.
    2. Antonides, Gerrit & de Groot, I. Manon, 2022. "Mental budgeting of the self-employed without personnel," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    3. Stephan Muehlbacher & Andre Hartmann & Erich Kirchler & James Alm, 2023. "Declaring income versus declaring taxes in tax compliance experiments: Does the design of laboratory experiments affect the results?," Economic and Political Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(3), pages 334-349, July.
    4. Salahudeen Saeed, 2020. "Small Business Owners’ Perception On Value Added Tax Administration In Ghana: A Preliminary Study," Accounting & Taxation, The Institute for Business and Finance Research, vol. 12(1), pages 97-105.
    5. Huang, Jiaqi & Antonides, Gerrit & Nie, Fengying, 2020. "Is mental accounting of farm produce associated with more consumption of own-produced food?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    6. Sanjit Dhami & Narges Hajimoladarvish, 2020. "Mental Accounting, Loss Aversion, and Tax Evasion: Theory and Evidence," CESifo Working Paper Series 8606, CESifo.
    7. Hu Rongyu, 2023. "Validity verification of Mental Accounting in Public Goods Payment," Working Papers 2213, Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics.
    8. Nagel, Hanskje & Rosendahl Huber, Laura & Van Praag, Mirjam & Goslinga, Sjoerd, 2019. "The effect of a tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of starting entrepreneurs: Evidence from a field experiment," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 261-283.
    9. Stephan Muehlbacher & Barbara Hartl & Erich Kirchler, 2017. "Mental Accounting and Tax Compliance," Public Finance Review, , vol. 45(1), pages 118-139, January.
    10. Zhao, Zhichao & Du, Fangyu & Mu, Huaizhong, 2024. "Flexibility in jobs and autonomy on saving: Mental accounting of personal pension saving decision in Chinese part-time employees," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    11. Olsen, Jerome & Kasper, Matthias & Kogler, Christoph & Muehlbacher, Stephan & Kirchler, Erich, 2019. "Mental accounting of income tax and value added tax among self-employed business owners," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 125-139.
    12. Benno Torgler, 2021. "Behavioral Taxation: Opportunities and Challenges," CREMA Working Paper Series 2021-25, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    13. Silva, Emmanuel Marques & Moreira, Rafael de Lacerda & Bortolon, Patricia Maria, 2023. "Mental Accounting and decision making: a systematic literature review," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 107(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Antonides, Gerrit & de Groot, I. Manon, 2022. "Mental budgeting of the self-employed without personnel," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    2. Nagel, Hanskje & Rosendahl Huber, Laura & Van Praag, Mirjam & Goslinga, Sjoerd, 2019. "The effect of a tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of starting entrepreneurs: Evidence from a field experiment," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 261-283.
    3. Olsen, Jerome & Kasper, Matthias & Kogler, Christoph & Muehlbacher, Stephan & Kirchler, Erich, 2019. "Mental accounting of income tax and value added tax among self-employed business owners," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 125-139.
    4. Anderson, Stephen J. & Lazicky, Christy & Zia, Bilal, 2021. "Measuring the unmeasured: Aggregating, anchoring, and adjusting to estimate small business performance," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    5. Szymon Chudziak, 2024. "Consumption Modelling Using Categorisation-Enhanced Mental Accounting," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 64(3), pages 1391-1442, September.
    6. Jaakko Aspara & Arvid Hoffmann, 2015. "Selling losers and keeping winners: How (savings) goal dynamics predict a reversal of the disposition effect," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 26(2), pages 201-211, June.
    7. Ahmad Farhan Alshira’h & Moh’d Alsqour & Abdalwali Lutfi & Adi Alsyouf & Malek Alshirah, 2020. "A Socio-Economic Model of Sales Tax Compliance," Economies, MDPI, vol. 8(4), pages 1-15, October.
    8. Mohammed Ziaul Hoque, 2017. "Mental budgeting and the financial management of small and medium entrepreneurs," Cogent Economics & Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 5(1), pages 1291474-129, January.
    9. Huang, Jiaqi & Antonides, Gerrit & Nie, Fengying, 2020. "Is mental accounting of farm produce associated with more consumption of own-produced food?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    10. Fred van Raaij, W. & Riitsalu, Leonore & Põder, Kaire, 2023. "Direct and indirect effects of self-control and future time perspective on financial well-being," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    11. Bao, Yue & Gao, Ziyou & Xu, Meng & Sun, Huijun & Yang, Hai, 2015. "Travel mental budgeting under road toll: An investigation based on user equilibrium," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 1-17.
    12. Khuc Dinh Nam & Nguyen Thi Binh Minh, 2021. "Determinants affecting tax compliance: A case of business households in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam," HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE - ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY, vol. 11(1), pages 136-152.
    13. Wisuwat Chujan & Nguyen Le Bao Ngoc & Ahmad Shabir Faizi, 2022. "Locus of Control on Financial Behavior and Financial Risk Attitude," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 23(2), pages 289-313, November.
    14. Botond Kőszegi & Filip Matějka, 2020. "Choice Simplification: A Theory of Mental Budgeting and Naive Diversification [“Fungibility, Labels, and Consumption,”]," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 135(2), pages 1153-1207.
    15. Shari De Baets & Dilek Önkal & Wasim Ahmed, 2022. "Do Risky Scenarios Affect Forecasts of Savings and Expenses?," Forecasting, MDPI, vol. 4(1), pages 1-28, February.
    16. Mari, Gabriele & Keizer, Renske, 2021. "Do high-income households 'label' family cash transfers? Evidence on family expenditures from Australia," SocArXiv ucyzb, Center for Open Science.
    17. Miotto, Ana Paula S. C. & Parente, Juracy, 2015. "Antecedentes e consequências do gerenciamento das finanças domésticas na classe média baixa brasileira," RAE - Revista de Administração de Empresas, FGV-EAESP Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo (Brazil), vol. 55(1), January.
    18. Diana Onu & Lynne Oats, 2018. "Tax Talk: An Exploration of Online Discussions Among Taxpayers," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 149(4), pages 931-944, June.
    19. Tsun‐Feng Chiang, 2021. "Financial capability and investment management of Chinese households: An application of hybrid item response theory," Journal of Consumer Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(4), pages 1442-1463, December.
    20. Tang, Ning & Baker, Andrew, 2016. "Self-esteem, financial knowledge and financial behavior," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 164-176.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    mental accounting; segregation; tax compliance; tax evasion; voluntary compliance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • H24 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies
    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
    • M13 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - New Firms; Startups

    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:mhr:finarc:urn:sici:0015-2218(201312)69:4_412:maosto_2.0.tx_2-l. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Thomas Wolpert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/fa .

    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.