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Can Tax Classes Build Compliance Culture? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments in Cameroon. Submitted.
With Marc Ateba, Miguel Fonseca, Jannesquin Royer.
This paper has been presented at: The Advances with Field Experiments Conference (Chicago), the CIBES Conference (Florence), the IFS/Tax Dev Internal Seminar series (London), and the IIPF Conference (Nairobi) and the Exeter Internal Seminar Series (Exeter).
Revise & Resubmit to International Tax and Public Finance Journal.
We explore how instructing future taxpayers on basic tax information helps build a tax-paying culture under low state capacity. We embedded a randomized survey experiment in a large tax awareness campaign towards young adults in Cameroon. We randomly assigned 1,962 public and private secondary school students from 42 classes to tax information classes. We provide causal evidence of significant effects
on basic tax knowledge and compliance attitudes with differential treatment effects across gender, risk attitudes and family background. Also providing social norms of compliance improves knowledge retention 13 months post-intervention. Our results indicate strong effects of the informational treatments for cohorts of students at both tails of the knowledge and tax morale distributions. These findings highlight a high potential for scalability and offer a new perspective on the political economy of tax educational reforms aimed at improved tax compliance norms among young and potentially entrepreneurial populations.
Do Salient Negative Externalities Deter Bribing? A Lab-in-the-Field Experimental Evidence from Cameroon.
With Miguel Fonseca.
This paper has been presented at: The Future of Behavioural Ethics Conference (Berlin), Economic Science Association Conference (Nairobi), Exeter PhD Conference.
Collecting additional data.
Small-scale corruption such as bribing has deleterious consequences for millions of people’s daily lives, especially in developing countries, as it undermines institutions and people’s trust in them. In this paper we analyze a lab-in-the-field experiment that provides insight into the effectiveness of informing participants about social costs of bribing in an artefactual three-person queue in which places are either assigned randomly or on a needs basis. In the absence of a message, bribing rates are unaffected by queue assignment. However, providing information about the externality caused by bribing greatly diminishes the incidence of bribing. We also find evidence of an interaction effect: messages are more effective when queue places are allocated on a needs basis. These findings support the argument that, in some contexts, preference for procedural fairness is less prevalent, yet salient awareness campaigns on the social harm caused by antisocial behavior
can be effective.
Keywords: Salience, Negative Externality, Corruption, Experiments
(JEL: D62, D73, C91, D83, O17)
The Compliance Effects of a Many-To-Many Communication Intervention Under Weak Capacity: Evidence from Cameroon
This paper has been presented at: The Cardiff SWDTP Conference, The Exeter University Internal Seminar Series.
How can tax administrations address ambiguity and information frictions in increasingly complex tax systems? This paper examines the compliance effects of introducing a digital Many-to-Many Communication (MTMC) service, a tax assistance
intervention through which tax officials respond to taxpayers’ queries in a credible, transparent, and real-time manner. It provides evidence on both the shortand long-run impacts of the MTMC system on tax compliance along the extensive margin. Exposure to a digital tax assistance scheme improves tax filing compliance through the reduced informational friction channel. However, it also provides evidence, consistent with theoretical predictions, that direct revenues remain modest, suggesting that assisted taxpayers did not change their perceived probability
of detection and thus reported little to no income. The MTMC intervention also generated indirect benefits in local networks. Tax information spills over local social networks and generates more compliance along the extensive margin, among unassisted taxpayers. These findings shed new light on the potential of real-time communication tools to strengthen compliance with taxes. More importantly, they raise awareness of the potential importance.
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