Work in progress

Can Tax Classes Build Compliance Culture? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments in Cameroon.

With Marc Ateba, Miguel Fonseca, Jannesquin Royer.

This paper has been presented at: The Exeter Internal Seminar Series (UK), the CIBES Conference (Florence), the IFS/Tax Dev Internal Seminar series (London), and the IIPF Conference (Nairobi).

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 12 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.

Preliminary draft available upon request.

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).

Are people aware of the harm they are causing to others when choosing to bribe? In this paper, We leverage a novel bribing game in the queue to examine the causal effect of providing salient information about the negative harm of bribing decisions on the extensive margin. In a two-by-two factorial design, We exogenously manipulate the assignment procedure in the queue (arbitrary vs value-based) and the salience of a negative social harm.

Slides will be available here soon.

Preliminary draft will be available here soon.

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 (UK), The Exeter University Internal Seminar Series (UK).

An extensive body of research has examined the compliance effects of one-to-one interactions between taxpayers and revenue agencies, focusing on the immediate impact of privately sent deterrence or behavioural messages. However, very little is known about taxpayers’ responses to alternative communication strategies. This paper investigates the role of a many-to-many communication intervention by using a combination of tax data from the Cameroon revenue authority and the synthetic control estimation strategy. The analysis pays particular attention to heterogeneity in response by looking into different firms’ attributes. It further explores potential spillover effects using harmonized geo-coded firm-level and industry data. Finally, this paper examines the relevance of two potential explaining channels.