Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/268475 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 423
Publisher: 
University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Zurich
Abstract: 
Do strong states affect the culture and actions of their citizens in a persistent way? And if so, can the capacity to tax, by itself, have a role in driving this effect? I study how the historical capacity of a state to collect taxes affects the decision of citizens to evade the mandatory military draft. I look at Italy during World War I and identify quasi-exogenous variation in tax collection induced by the administrative structure of Piedmont during the 1814-1870 period. Using newly collected and digitised individual data on nearly all the men of the 1899 cohort drafted in the province of Turin, I find that citizens born in towns with lower historical fiscal capacity are more likely to evade the military draft, and that the effect transmits through changes in culture. Results are consistent with fiscal capacity spurring norms of rule-following able to persist in the long run. Placebo estimates from other Italian territories confirm that the effect I estimate can be attributed to fiscal capacity, and it is not confounded by legal capacity.
Subjects: 
Fiscal capacity
Tax collection
Culture
Military draft
Italy
World War I
JEL: 
D73
D74
D91
H20
N43
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.