SOCIOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF TAX EVASION: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE ITALIAN CASE
Tesi di Dottorato
Data di Pubblicazione:
2023
Citazione:
SOCIOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF TAX EVASION: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE ITALIAN CASE / G.l. Pasin ; supervisors: F. Squazzoni, A. Szekely ; Ph.D. programme director: M. Guerci. Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali e Politiche, 2023 Oct 05. 35. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2022.
Abstract:
How do people behave when their short-term interest of minimizing paying taxes contrasts with the
long-term collective interest in ensuring sufficient tax payments to finance public goods? In this sit uation, individual decision-making is probably affected by factors beyond any material cost-benefit
considerations, such as cultural, institutional, social, and normative influences. This doctoral thesis
aimed to investigate the sociological drivers of individual tax evasion in Italy with a specific focus
on the North-South divide. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, I developed a theoretical
framework that integrated three classes of non-economic motivations for tax evasion: individual, in stitutional, and social. I argued that when deciding whether to comply with their taxes, people are
motivated by their moral imperatives toward taxation (i.e., individual mechanism), their perception
of institutional performance in terms of public goods provision (i.e., institutional mechanism), and
their social norms of tax payment (i.e., social mechanism). I studied these mechanisms using three
complementary methodologies on various Italian samples recruited online. In a survey, I measured
the individual, institutional, and social mechanisms to investigate the roots of the North-South tax
evasion gap in Italy. Then, to understand why Italians evade taxes so systematically, I studied the
main drivers of tax evasion using two experiments where the institutional and social mechanisms
were manipulated: a factorial survey, where I measured tax compliance intention given hypothetical
scenarios, and a behavioural experiment, where I measured tax behaviour in an incentivised envi ronment that mimicked the tax system in Italy. Taken together, the results of the three empirical
studies show that social norms are key to explain tax evasion in Italy. In other words, when deciding
whether to pay their taxes, individuals are partially influenced by the institutional environment,
and mostly by their own beliefs about others’ tax payment (i.e., empirical expectations) and their
beliefs about the social acceptance of tax evasion (i.e., normative expectations).
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Elenco autori:
G.L. Pasin
Link alla scheda completa: