I am postdoc and lab manager at the Department of Economics at the University of Mannheim. From fall 2021 to fall 2022, I was a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Centre for Taxation (NoCeT) and the FAIR group at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), funded by the DAAD PRIME program.
I obtained my PhD from the University of Cologne and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn.
My research interests center around questions of optimal taxation and public economics, specifically using methods from experimental and behavioral economics.
I am currently exploring potentially positive welfare implications of evasion opportunities in tax regimes. Another line of my research addresses how personal preferences, (mis)perceptions and norms can inform optimal tax policies.
A copy of my CV can be found here.
Email: schneider@uni-mannheim.de
Altruistic Behavior and Government Interventions in Times of Crisis, joint with Marina Schröder & Maximilian Todtenhaupt
We analyze the response of charitable donations to restrictions on civil liberties. We argue that restrictions either increase altruistic behavior by raising the perceived benefit of donations, or crowd out altruistic behavior due to utility losses associated with restrictions. Using data on donations in Norwegian grocery stores, we find evidence for a significant increase in donation rates following the implementation of local restrictions. We provide evidence that this rise is likely driven by individuals not directly affected by the restrictions. Thus, the influence of government restrictions on altruistic behavior depends strongly on the impact of these restrictions for the individual.
The Bright Side of Tax Evasion, joint with Wladislaw Mill
This paper investigates whether tax evasion can be beneficial for an optimal income tax schedule. Past theoretical discussions have presented mixed outcomes as to whether allowing taxpayers to opt into uncertainty could indeed enhance overall tax revenues. In this study, we conducted an original real effort experiment in an online labor market with almost 1,000 participants to test this hypothesis empirically. Our findings show significant positive labor supply responses to the opportunity to evade (increased labor supply by 37%). More importantly, the expected tax revenue significantly and substantially increased by up to more than 50%. As an example, our data suggests that a 40% tax rate with complete enforcement could be replaced with a 28% tax rate with the option of tax evasion, without any loss in tax revenue. Strikingly, this effect persists when comparing effective tax rates: Lowering effective tax rates through probabilistic enforcement (the opportunity to evade) is more efficient than simply lowering statutory tax rates. Our findings suggest that the opportunity for tax evasion can increase tax revenues beyond what a corresponding decrease in nominal rates would achieve. For welfare analyses, this highlights the importance of not only considering the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) but total earned income elasticities.
Courts and Public Opinion in International Multi-Level Court Systems, joint with Pascal Langenbach
In this paper, we report results from two online vignette experiments on how de- cisions in international multi-level court systems can influence public opinion about national policies. Specifically, we study the German Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. The experimental design emphasizes the possible conflict between court decisions at the national and the international level. Our vignettes examine four different policies. The results suggest that both courts can influence domestic public opinion, and that the European court’s decision can serve as a counterbalance to the public-opinion effects of the national court’s decision. Notably, the presence and magnitude of these effects are highly context-dependent. While the national origin of the case seems not to matter for public opinion on average, we find heterogeneous treatment effects for subsamples of the political right.
Biased Preferences for Wealth Taxation: The Case of Misperceived Tax Burden Consequences, joint with Malte Chirvi & Hans-Peter Huber, 2021; TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency Working Paper Series 54
It is well documented that humans have difficulties in understanding nonlinear growth. This paper explores to what extent this type of bounded rationality translates into preferences for specific wealth-tax designs. In particular, we quantify shifts in stated preferences for wealth taxation caused by misperceived burden consequences of commonly politically discussed tax parameters: tax allowances and tax rates. For this, we conducted a randomized survey experiment with over 1,200 respondents in Germany. In a 2x2 design, our respondents were randomly selected to indicate both their preferred tax allowance and tax rate for either a yearly or a one- time wealth tax. Our treatment group was provided with easy-to-understand information on the resulting total tax burden for the respective wealth tax instrument. We find the preferred effective tax rate drops by almost 15 percentage points for a yearly wealth tax if our participants are fully informed, whereas we do not find this effect for the one-time wealth tax. We argue that both the total tax burden and the perceived feasibility of single payments are factors that form preferences for tax parameters.
Preferences for Wealth Taxation - Design, Framing and the Role of Partisanship, joint with Malte Chirvi, 2020; arqus Working Paper 260
Empirical literature on preferences for wealth taxation almost exclusively focuses on either the emotionally loaded estate tax or rather general concepts of redistributive preferences. Yet, it remains unclear whether the exceptional opposition towards the estate tax is applicable to other instruments of net wealth taxation. This study presents, to our knowledge, the first investigation of how individuals want to tax wealth - across a variety of tangible wealth tax instruments. In doing so, we particularly test for the presence of framing effects, incidence concentration and the role of wealth characteristics within the different tax configurations. For this, we conducted a factorial vignette survey experiment with over 3,200 respondents on Amazon‘s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Each respondent was randomized into one of four burden-equivalent wealth tax instruments: an estate tax, a one-time wealth tax, a decennial wealth tax or a yearly wealth tax. Subsequently we asked each respondent to state her preferred overall lifetime tax burden for a set of hypothetical individuals. Our findings yield several interesting insights. First, we find that the exceptional opposition towards the estate tax is not applicable to other instruments of wealth taxation and is only valid for certain sub- groups. In general, our empirical findings provide preferred tax rates between 12.8 to 14.9 percent of overall lifetime tax burden. Second, we document an exceptional opposition towards the mere name “estate tax” in relation to equivalent wealth tax instruments for certain subgroups. Republicans particularly reject the estate tax with a lower proposed effective tax rate of around 3.1 percentage points compared to all other wealth taxes - even the perfectly congruent one-time wealth tax. Third, we uncover the influence of normative preferences for specific design features on the support for a wealth tax. Proposed effective tax rates of the estate tax and the one-time wealth tax show a significant progressivity, whereas no progressivity can be observed for both periodical taxes. The presence of children has an especially significant negative effect in one-off wealth taxes at the end of the lifetime.
What Drives Green Investments? Understanding Investors’ Preferences, joint with Andre Lot, Rabia Masood & Francisco Santos
Although environmental labels are prevalent in the investment market, it remains unclear which specific dimensions investors find attractive under such labels. This study presents an experiment that explores six commonly defined aspects of green investments — magnitude of CO₂ saved, timing, certainty, geographical proximity, area, and mitigation approach — and how investors prioritize them. Participants engaged in ten fully incentivized investment rounds with hypothetical green funds, where both monetary returns and environmental impacts were real: financial gains affected personal earnings, and investment choices led to actual donations to aligned charities. While the magnitude of the investment's impact does not appear to significantly influence decisions, investors exhibit a strong aversion to ambiguity, preferring certainty and geographical proximity, particularly favoring local impact investments.
Preferences for Taxing Wealth and Income, joint with Ralf Maiterth & Yuri Piper
We examine German individuals’ preferences for income taxation, wealth taxation, and, importantly, the interplay between these two tax instruments. Specifically, we assess three interdependent dimensions as determinants of underlying preferences: (1) Do individuals attribute an ability-to-pay taxes to wealth, even for a non-wealth-targeting tax instrument, such as the income tax? (2) What is the implicit trade-off between preferences for an income and a wealth tax? (3) How do misperceptions about taxes affect preferences, and how does providing information to correct them alter those preferences? While policymakers and voters often decide over a bundle of tax instruments, prior research has mostly focused on preferences for single tax instruments. Actual tax systems consist of multiple taxes. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze preferences over a bundle of tax instruments and how these relate to preferences for single tax instruments. To achieve this, we implement a large-scale online survey experiment.
Externality Production and Property Rights: Social Preferences & Moral Rules, joint with Ernesto M. Gavassa-Pérez
In the presence of property rights, the seminal Coase Theorem posits that markets will clear at the social optimum. In this project, we examine the role of social preferences in Coasian bargaining on two levels: First, to what extent do the producer's social preferences impact the production of externalities? Can deviations from selfishness be explained by social preferences? Second, and most importantly, when property rights are allocated by a third party (a spectator), can their social preferences predict the allocation of property rights? We first derive theoretical predictions, considering preference profiles of producers and consumers that are either selfish, inequality averse, altruistic, socially efficient, or maximin. The predictions are clear: regardless of each agent's preference profile, the existence of property rights drives the economy to the socially optimum level. Additionally, social preferences cannot predict a systematic allocation of property rights to one party. Intuitively speaking, social preferences might even predict behavior at odds with the concept of compensatory justice (e.g., maximin and inequality aversion can even predict giving the property rights to the party that generates the negative externality). Based on these predictions, we run a series of lab experiments to evaluate if social preferences are a suitable predictor of property rights allocation and socially optimal production of externalities - or if there might be more suitable predictors for the allocation of property rights. Our findings potentially hold important implications for policy, such as shifting from Pigouvian taxes to subsidies for optimal externality production, and contribute to a deeper understanding of social preferences in property rights and externality management.
Why Matching Works, joint with Kremena Bachmann & Andre Lot
This study examines the behavioral mechanisms that make matching contributions effective in boosting retirement savings. Specifically, we connect to Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) to explore the underpinnings of how individuals’ perceptions of gains and losses shape their responses to matching contributions versus rebates. We hypothesize that the perceived gain from matching contributions outweighs the perceived loss from equivalent rebates, explaining why matching is a more powerful incentive to encourage savings.