Collaborative Research: Experimental Evidence of the Effectiveness of Mechanisms Designed to Increase Tax Compliance

旨在提高纳税遵从性的机制有效性的实验证据--摘要低税收大大限制了政府提供基本公共服务的能力。尽管这一问题很严重，但几乎没有系统地尝试设计和评估可行的、可扩展的方法，以加强税收和公共部门的业绩。通过四项相关但不同的研究，该项目将通过检查激励政策对公共雇员业绩的影响，以及公民参与和税务人员的能力在税收中的作用来填补这一空白。鉴于这些问题的重要性以及研究人员-政策制定者伙伴关系的根深蒂固和持续性质，研究结果将为世界各地的大量政策制定者提供关于增加税收的实际指导。虽然在法定税收的优化设计方面已经做了大量工作(例如，波美兰兹2014年、克莱文和瓦西姆2013年)，但对在特定税收制度内增加收入和执法的关注较少。该项目旨在探讨有助于城市财产税低征收的执法和合规问题，并审查旨在解决这些问题的计划的有效性。该项目包括四项研究。第一项是一项新的随机试验，旨在解决税收士气和公民纳税意愿的问题。这一构成部分寻求通过引出纳税人的服务偏好并与其地方政府分享这一信息来加强纳税和提供服务之间的联系。地方将被随机分配，要么从这次优惠诱导中获得信息，要么被随机分配到根据纳税人偏好分配一部分预算的地方，或者照常支出。跟踪收入、分配、服务提供和公民信念将为这些计划对纳税人态度和实际收入的影响提供一个干净的经验估计。接下来的两项研究重点是激励税务人员的业绩。在第二项研究中，收税员被随机分配，根据他们的表现竞争更好的工作职位，这是通过追回税款或税基的增加来衡量的。这种设计允许对这些非财务激励对收入和收集者行为的影响进行干净的测试，这些影响将在本项目过程中进行分析。第三项研究将评估前一项研究的长期影响，在前一项研究中，税务人员被随机分配，根据收入征收、审计和/或主观评级获得为期两年的绩效工资。这一绩效工资于两年前结束，目前的研究将确定过去一段时间的绩效工资是否对税收信息产生了持续影响，这些信息可以帮助设计此类计划的最佳持续时间和间隔。最后的研究将通过利用同一地区不同收款者的重叠来区分个人和地区的影响，来分析个别检查员的特征对收入的影响。

Experimental Evidence of the Effectiveness of Mechanisms Designed to Increase Tax Compliance - AbstractLow tax revenues significantly limit governments' ability to provide essential public services. Despite the gravity of this problem, few systematic attempts have been made to design and evaluate feasible, scalable ways to enhance revenue collection and public sector performance. Through four related but distinct studies, this project will fill this gap by examining the impact of incentive policies on public employee performance, as well as the roles of citizen engagement and tax collectors' ability on revenue collection. Given the critical importance of these issues and the embedded and sustained nature of the researcher-policymaker partnerships, the results will provide practical guidance on increasing tax revenues to a large audience of policymakers worldwide.While there has been significant work done on the optimal design of statutory taxes (e.g., Pomeranz 2014, Kleven and Waseem 2013), there has been less focus on increasing revenue and enforcement within a given system of taxation. This project seeks to explore enforcement and compliance issues contributing to the low collection of urban property taxes and examine the effectiveness of schemes designed to address those issues. The project consists of four studies. The first is a new randomized trial that addresses tax morale and the willingness of citizens to pay taxes. This component seeks to strengthen the link between tax payment and service provision by eliciting taxpayers' service preferences and sharing this information with their local governments. Localities will be randomly assigned to either receive the information from this preference elicitation or not, and those that receive it will be randomly assigned to allocate a portion of their budgets based on taxpayer preferences or to spend as normal. Tracking revenues, allocations, service provision, and citizen beliefs will provide a clean empirical estimate of the impact of these schemes on taxpayer attitudes and actual revenues. The next two studies focus on incentivizing tax collector performance. In the second study, tax collectors were randomly assigned to compete for preferable job postings based on their performance, which was measured by the increase in recovery or the tax base. This design allows for clean testing of the impact of these non-financial incentives on revenues and collector behavior, which will be analyzed during the course of this project. The third study will evaluate the long-term impacts of a previous study, in which tax collectors were randomly assigned to receive performance pay for two years based on revenue collection, audits, and/or subjective ratings. This performance pay ended two years ago, and the current study will determine whether this past period of performance pay had a persistent effect on tax collection' information that can help design the optimal duration for and interval between such schemes. The final study will analyze the impact of individual inspectors' characteristics on revenues by using the overlap of different collectors in the same region to separate individual from regional effects.