Saying & Doing – Two separate things?: A study in how taxpayers’ behavior is affected by tax morale.

Sammanfattning: The subject of tax morale and tax compliance has become one of increasing attention from an economist’s point of view. Tax evasion amongst private people is a crime that is estimated to cost the government around 22 billion SEK every year. Plenty economists research the determinants of tax morale in hope of finding ways to increase the actual level of tax compliance. This thesis questions the sometimes taken for granted linkage between attitude and behavior. The purpose of the thesis is to examine whether tax morale affects the taxpayer’s actual behavior and directly answer the question: “Does high tax morale implicate increased actual amount of tax paid?” This thesis differ from previous research in the way that the dependent variable is here measured as an average of the total paid tax in each municipality in Sweden and is thereby supposed to be a more accurate measure of actual behavior. Using fixed effects regressions with Swedish municipality data over four years during the period 2001 – 2006, we fail to reject the null hypothesis and cannot draw any conclusion regarding the response of tax morale on taxpayers’ behavior. Whether this insignificance is due to the hardship of avoiding tax payments is controlled for in a secondary model which neither receives any significant results. The findings suggest that further research in the area of attitude and actual behavior is needed.