You’ve Got Mail: A Randomized Field Experiment on Tax Evasion | Zendy

Kristina Maria Bott | Zendy; Alexander W. Cappelen | Zendy; Erik Ø. Sørensen | Zendy; Bertil Tungodden | Zendy

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You’ve Got Mail: A Randomized Field Experiment on Tax Evasion

Author(s) -

Kristina Maria Bott,

Alexander W. Cappelen,

Erik Ø. Sørensen,

Bertil Tungodden

Publication year - 2019

Publication title -

management science

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 4.954

H-Index - 255

eISSN - 1526-5501

pISSN - 0025-1909

DOI - 10.1287/mnsc.2019.3390

Subject(s) - taxpayer , tax evasion , margin (machine learning) , randomized experiment , evasion (ethics) , economics , sample (material) , psychology , public economics , computer science , medicine , statistics , macroeconomics , mathematics , chemistry , immune system , chromatography , machine learning , immunology

We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15,000 taxpayers in Norway, who were likely to have misreported their foreign income. We find that the inclusion of a moral appeal or a sentence that increases the perceived probability of detection in a letter from the tax authorities almost doubled the average self-reported foreign income. The moral letter mainly works on the intensive margin, while the detection letter mainly works on the extensive margin. We also show that the detection letter has large long-term effects on tax compliance.

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