Publikationen

Previous accounting research shows that taxes affect decision making by individuals and firms. Most studies assume that agents have an accurate perception regarding their tax burden. However, there is a growing body of literature analyzing whether taxes are indeed perceived correctly. We review 128 studies on the measurement of tax misperception and its behavioral implications. The review reveals that many taxpayers have substantial tax misperceptions that lead to biased decision making. We develop a Behavioral Taxpayer Response Model on the impact of provided tax information on tax perception. Besides individual traits, characteristics of the tax information and the decision environment determine the extent of tax misperception. We discuss opportunities for future research and methodological limitations. While there is much evidence on tax misperception at the individual level, we hardly find any research at the firm level. Little is known about the real effects of managers’ tax misperception and on how tax information is strategically managed to impact stakeholders. This research gap is surprising as a large part of the accounting literature analyzes decision making and disclosure of firms. We recommend a mixed-method approach combining experiments, surveys, and archival data analyses to improve the knowledge on tax misperception and its consequences.

The individual capacity to form personal preferences constitutes an essential element of thedemocratic process. At the same time, policies with far-reaching consequences often require profound expertise. Taxation is such an example. Due to its complex character, bounded rationality might induce biases causing other outcomes than intended. This paper quantifies shifts in stated preferences for wealth taxation caused by misperceived burden consequences of commonly politically discussed tax parameters: tax allowances and tax rates. For this, we conducted a randomized survey experiment with over 1,200 respondents in Germany. In a 2 by 2 design, our respondents were randomly selected to indicate both their preferred tax allowance and tax rate for either a yearly or a one-time wealth tax. Our treatment group was provided with easy-to-understand information on the resulting effective lifetime tax burden for the respective instrument. We find the preferred effective tax rate to drop by almost 15 percentage points for a yearly wealth tax if our participants are fully informed, whereas we do not find this effect for the one-time wealth tax. In terms of informed preferences our respondents preferthe yearly wealth tax over a one time wealth tax if misperceptions are resolved: the preferred effective tax burden of a yearly wealth tax is about 25 percentage points higher (40.0% vs.15.2%). While not being able to fully explain the source of this difference, we argue that both the total burden as well as the reasonability of single payments might be factors that form preferences for tax parameters.