IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32588.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Paying Your Fair Share: Perceived Fairness and Tax Compliance

Author

Listed:
  • Brad C. Nathan
  • Ricardo Perez-Truglia
  • Alejandro Zentner

Abstract

We provide evidence on the role of fairness for tax compliance: households are willing to pay more in taxes if they believe that other households are contributing their fair share. We conducted an information-disclosure natural field experiment in the context of property taxes in the United States. We induced exogenous shocks to households' perceptions about the average tax rate paid by other households. We find that a higher perceived average tax rate decreases the probability of filing a tax appeal. Translating our estimates into a money metric, we find that for each additional $1 contributed by the average household, a taxpayer is willing to pay an extra $0.43 in his or her own taxes.

Suggested Citation

  • Brad C. Nathan & Ricardo Perez-Truglia & Alejandro Zentner, 2024. "Paying Your Fair Share: Perceived Fairness and Tax Compliance," NBER Working Papers 32588, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32588
    Note: PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32588.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

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

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods
    • H70 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - General

    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:nbr:nberwo:32588. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.