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1-10 of 24 results

  • Blog
  • 22nd Nov 2013

Behavioural Insights Tax Trials Win Civil Service Award

Last night, at the UK Government’s Civil Service Awards, the tax trials that we ran with HMRC won the Innovation award. The trials involved rewriting tax reminder letters to incorporate behavioural economics principles, and testing these against controls. BIT and HMRC were able to show how these simple, cost-free interventions…
  • Academic publication
  • 1st Mar 2014

The Behavioralist As Tax Collector: Using Natural Field Experiments to Enhance Tax Compliance

Tax collection problems date back to the earliest recorded history of mankind. This paper begins with a simple theoretical construct of paying (rather than declaring) taxes, which we argue has been an overlooked aspect of tax compliance.
  • Academic publication
  • 23rd Apr 2015

The use of field experiments to increase tax compliance

Governments have become increasingly interested in the ‘explosion’ of research into taxpayer behaviour. This article briefly reviews two main theories of tax compliance (‘deterrence’ and ‘non-deterrence’), before discussing the recent rapid rise of natural field experiments (NFEs) in this area.
  • Blog
  • 2nd Mar 2016

Tax lotteries and Behavioural Insights in Europe

Last week, the European Commission published a report on the growing uptake of behavioural insights across the governments of Europe. You can read the report here. One of the most interesting parts of the paper is on the growing use of tax lotteries in European countries. Lotteries or prize draws…
  • Blog
  • 18th Mar 2016

Sugar tax: how will it affect behaviour?

One of the most striking announcements in this week’s UK budget was the introduction of a new ‘soft drinks levy’ (quickly dubbed the sugar tax), which will come into force in 2018. New taxes aren’t usually associated with the Behavioural Insights Team - partly because BIT’s preference is to find…
  • Academic publication
  • 15th Jun 2016

Behavioral Interventions in Tax Compliance: Evidence from Guatemala

This paper presents results from a large (43,387) nationwide randomized controlled trial in Guatemala that used reminders to promote tax compliance.
  • Academic publication
  • 21st Jun 2016

Casting the Tax Net Wider: Experimental Evidence from Costa Rica

The majority of firms in developing countries are informal, and encouraging them to register with the tax authority has proven challenging and costly.
  • Blog
  • 22nd Sep 2016

Increasing tax payments in Costa Rica

Over the past few years, BIT has implemented a number of successful trials using letters to remind people to pay their taxes. In March 2015, we ran our first trial in Costa Rica. In this case we tested sending emails - an even lower cost intervention than letters. Working with…

Also available in: Español

  • Academic publication
  • 28th Apr 2017

Failure to CAPTCHA Attention: Null Results from an Honesty Priming Experiment in Guatemala

We report results from a large online randomised tax experiment in Guatemala. The trial involves short messages and choices presented to taxpayers as part of a CAPTCHA pop-up window immediately before they file a tax return, with the aim of priming honest declarations.
  • Academic publication
  • 12th May 2018

Testing Local Descriptive Norms and Salience of Enforcement Action: A Field Experiment to Increase Tax Collection

The use of behavioural science interventions, and particularly social norms, in tax compliance has become a growth industry for scholars and practitioners alike in recent years.