# **Introduction**

Taxation is a key, and perhaps the most foundational, element of the relationship between citizens and governments. For citizens, the institution of taxation of course has important effects on disposable income and publicly available goods and services. For policy makers and governments, raising revenues to fund government activity is a necessary condition for assuring institutional survival and maintaining public order. The question of why and under what conditions citizens comply with tax demands made on them by governments is therefore central to our understanding both of tax policy, and of political economy and governance more generally.

Over the last decades, scholars and practitioners have increasingly acknowledged that tax compliance can only partially be understood as a narrowly “rational” act in the sense that taxpayers only comply because the expected costs of avoiding or evading taxes exceed the costs of taxation. In this context, the term _tax morale_ has often come to denote – basically as a residual category – motivations for complying with taxes that go beyond the expected costs of detection and punishment in models of “rational crime”. Research has unearthed considerable variation in tax morale between individuals, regions and countries, and has generated useful theory and tools for understanding it.

The key questions about tax morale for policy makers and governments relate to their ability to affect it. Higher tax morale is an asset for governments on many levels: lower tax collection costs and higher revenues have direct financial value (conditional on policy). Tax morale can also benefit economic policy indirectly. For example, if higher nominal tax rates increase the marginal distortions and welfare costs of taxation and higher compliance allows for lower nominal rates, tax morale can reduce the welfare burden of taxation. Higher tax morale may also allow developing country governments to rely less on tariffs, which are often thought to be especially distortionary and detrimental to growth.

These considerations lead to the empirical question of what kinds of motivations generate tax morale, and how they can best be promoted. A growing literature has sought to address this question, and found some experimental evidence linking different types of interventions to tax morale in a variety of settings. However, since much of this literature has focused on a small set of developed countries, it is very unclear how broadly applicable these findings are, and how universally the suggested mechanisms apply.

In this paper, we use a new type of survey experiment implemented with a uniquely broad sample of 65,000 respondents from 50 countries to investigate this question. Specifically, we estimate the effects of two interventions on tax morale: a “bottom up participation” intervention asking respondents to state their expenditure preferences, and a “top down accountability” intervention giving respondents information about anti-corruption agencies and the punishments they help inflict on corrupt officials. The design was pre-registered with EGAP prior to data collection.

Overall, we find large and statistically significant positive effects of both interventions on two measures of tax morale. These results are basically unaffected by a series of demanding robustness checks. We are also able to demonstrate that subjects actually absorb the information given to them in the interventions, and that women respond less strongly to them than men.

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