Dr Theresa Kuhn awarded a grant for a study on citizens willingness to pay taxes

Congratulations to Theresa Kuhn, who has been awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant for a project entitled The boundaries of solidarity. Tax compliance in a globalised society.

The project will seek to understand how citizens willingness to pay taxes is influenced by their information on how effectively their taxes will be used, and at which level (local/regional, national, European) they will be redistributed. To answer this question, Theresa will carry out a number of tax compliance experiments in the United Kingdom and Germany.

In the experiments, subjects will be given the opportunity to earn money and to evade taxes by reporting a lower income than they had actually earned. Subjects will be divided into treatment groups that differ on the following parameters: (a) the information they obtain on how efficiently tax payers money is being used, and (b) the information with respect to the level the taxes will be redistributed (local/regional, national, European). To ensure external validity, these experiments will be triangulated with new survey data on citizens willingness to pay taxes in several European countries.

The project starts 1 September 2012 and will end on 30 June 2013.