Fiscal Autonomy and Tax Morale: Evidence from Germany

Author: BENNO TORGLER AND JAN WERNER
Published in PFM, Vol. 5 No. 4

Why people pay their taxes voluntarily is a key puzzle in the public finance literature. Some suggest that factors such as the level of tax morale, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, affects compliance behaviour. While there have been numerous studies that have explored tax compliance or tax evasion, very few have explored the concept of tax morale in any detail. The basic intention of the empirical part is to analyse how fiscal autonomy affects tax morale in Germany. This also allows fill a gap in the tax compliance literature, which has rarely analysed the impact of fiscal autonomy on tax compliance or tax morale. Strong evidence has been found that a higher fiscal autonomy leads to a higher tax morale, controlling in a multivariate analysis for additional factors.

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