Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/58494 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6049
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We conduct a framed field experiment with 245 employed persons (no students) as subjects and a real tax, which is levied on the subjects' income from working in our real effort task. In our first three treatments, the net wage is constant but gross wages are subject to different constant marginal tax rates (0, 25%, 50%). It turns out that the effort is significantly higher under the tax than in the no tax treatment. Subjects perceive a too high net wage because they underestimate the tax. We conjecture that tax perception depends on the tax rate, the presentation of the tax and the experience subjects have with taxation. These conjectures are confirmed in four further treatments employing a direct and an indirect progressive tax scale. It turns out that simple at taxes are particularly prone to being misperceived because their simplicity reduces the tax salience.
Subjects: 
field experiment
real effort experiment
tax perception
tax salience
tax experience
behavioral economics
JEL: 
C91
D14
H24
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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