TY - JOUR A1 - Fellner, Gerlinde A1 - Sausgruber, Rupert A1 - Traxler, Christian T1 - Testing Enforcement Strategies in the Field: Threat, Moral Appeal and Social Information JF - Journal of the European Economic Association N2 - We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in compliance. Among different mailings, a threat treatment which makes a high detection risk salient has a significant deterrent effect. Neither appealing to morals nor imparting information about others’ behavior enhances compliance on aggregate. However, the information condition has a weak positive effect in municipalities where evasion is believed to be common. KW - field experiments KW - enforcement strategies KW - compliance KW - perceptions Y1 - 2013 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-19704 N1 - This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of the European Economic Association. The final authenticated version is available online at: DOI 10.1111/jeea.12013| VL - 11 IS - 3 SP - 634 EP - 660 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Traxler, Christian A1 - Berger, Melissa A1 - Fellner-Röhling, Gerlinde A1 - Sausgruber, Rupert T1 - Higher Taxes, more Evasion? Evidence from Border Differentials in TV License Fees JF - Journal of Public Economics N2 - This paper studies the evasion of TV license fees in Austria. We exploit border differentials to identify the effect of fees on evasion. Comparing municipalities at the low- and high-fee side of state borders reveals that higher fees trigger significantly more evasion. Our preferred estimator indicates that a one percent increase in fees raises the evasion rate by 0.3 percentage points. The positive effect of fees on evasion is confirmed in different parametric and non-parametric approaches and survives several robustness checks. KW - Evasion KW - TV license fees KW - Border tax differentials KW - Regression discontinuity design Y1 - 2016 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-21571 SN - 0047-2727 N1 - This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Public Economics. The final authenticated version is available online at: DOI 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.01.007 VL - 135 SP - 74 EP - 86 PB - Elsevier B.V. ER -