influence taxpayer behavior. Third, as Luttmer and Singhal (2014) point out, governments across the world appear to be investing in increasing individuals’ intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, and cultivating and reinforcing norms of tax compliance, for example by publishing lists of tax debtors or recognizing “distinguished taxpayers”.

For these reasons, social scientific work has increasingly investigated tax morale as a factor in tax compliance. Below, we focus on the aspects of reciprocity, procedural justice and institutions that our study speaks most directly to.

# **Tax morale, reciprocity and fiscal exchange**

One straightforward reason why individuals might voluntarily comply with taxes is because they view taxes as part of a social contract where they help fund the public purse and the state provides services in return. This logic of reciprocity is at the core of the “fiscal exchange” or “social contract” hypothesis, which stipulates that the link between taxes and government spending helps explain compliance.

There is some empirical evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Flores-Macías (2016) uses experimental evidence from Mexico to show that respondents who were reminded that their tax money is spent on security (the most salient public good in the country) show the highest increase in tax compliance, compared to other messages. Ortega, Ronconi, and Sanguinetti (2016) also provide experimental evidence from Latin America showing that taxpayers who were given vignettes about high government performance in the provision of public goods like school supplies were more tax compliant. Ali, Fjeldstad, and Sjursen (2014) find that in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa, the level of public goods provision has a significant, positive relationship with tax compliance.

Other studies present evidence that is less aligned with the fiscal exchange hypothesis. Yesegat and Fjeldstad (2016) find no evidence for a logic of fiscal exchange among business-owners in Ethiopia, although measurement is poor and the sample is business-owners, who might behave differently from private individuals. The experiment in Castro and Scartascini (2015) finds null effects on compliance when respondents are reminded about public goods provision, although the authors attribute this to a weak treatment and the difficulty of changing perceptions of goods provision with just one message.

# **Tax morale, institutions and political legitimacy**

A related but distinct argument to the fiscal exchange hypothesis is that individuals comply with taxes because they trust the government and think that the process by which the tax was decided on is fair and legitimate.

Descriptive cross-country work based on individual-level surveys such as the World Values Survey shows that trust in government, support for democracy, and measures of the quality of institutions are positively related to survey-based measures of tax morale (Alm and Torgler 2006). Survey-based research focusing on the developing world by Daude, Gutiérrez, and Melguizo (2012) finds some support for a positive relationship between tax compliance and trust in government as well. On the other hand, the correlation between tolerance of tax evasion and 4