in the laboratory. The null results are just as consistent with laboratory experiments being generally wrong as they are with Guatemalan taxpayers being an exception from the rule.

In our view, this is an illustration of why there is value to a more large-scale and cross-country experimental study of tax morale. As described below, we implement our study on a uniquely broad set of respondents from countries spanning all continents, and exhibiting a wide variety of political institutions and tax systems. We believe that seeing how one and the same experiment replicates across a vast set of contexts is informative both for researchers interested in explanations that are as general as possible and for policy makers interested in finding solutions that are as specific as necessary.

## **Retributive justice and tax morale**

Finally, beyond specifically political institutions, specific arrangements related to the proper administration of government funds may also matter for citizens’ willingness to contribute to the tax system. In particular, as Tsai (2017) and Tsai et al. (2019) argue, high-level institutions that punish malfeasance in the public sector can help signal to ordinary citizens that their government cares about the public interest, and that corruption is not tolerated. As she argues, such institutions, besides deterring malfeasance ex ante, also help uphold the fundamental values of the political community, and allow elites to show themselves to be moral actors and leaders.

In this vein, Xiaobo et al. (2019) show in an empirical analysis of property taxes in China that the effectiveness of citizen input in generating citizens’ willingness to comply with taxation is dependent upon the existence of top-down sanctioning institutions. Below, we use a new prime about the existence of such institutions of “retributive justice”" as a treatment to investigate whether these affect tax morale.

# **Research Design**

In order to contribute to a better understanding of tax morale, we conduct a global online survey experiment of tax morale attitudes. At the empirical core of the study, we use an experiment to estimate the effects of two interventions on tax morale, relative to a control group: First, we look at the effects of a bottom-up participation treatment, where we ask respondents to state their spending preferences. As discussed above, treatments eliciting spending preferences have been found to increase tax morale in some experimental literature, though much of the research here has been confined to specific political and cultural contexts. The breadth of our global survey experiment allows us to get a better sense of the degree to which this type of intervention actually affects tax morale.

Second, in order to test the predictions of a theory of retributive justice, we look at whether a “top-down accountability” treatment, which increases the salience of anti-corruption agencies and the punishments they inflict on corrupt officials, can improve tax morale.

To implement this test, we randomly vary a portion of the survey between the three conditions as laid out in Table 1.

Table 1: Treatments

**<u>Control group</u>**

|**Top-down accountability**|**Bottom-up participation intervention**|
|---|---|
|**intervention**||

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