Terrorism and Tax Morale
When:
—
Venue:
Online
We are pleased to announce the 2nd Seminar Series on Governance, Institutions, and Sustainability jointly hosted by the Centre for Political Economy and Institutional Studies and by the Birkbeck Responsible Business Centre, within the Birkbeck Business School.
In our rapidly evolving world, the intricate web connecting governance, institutions, and sustainability has become increasingly prominent. We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners to enhance this very important debate and to join us in exploring the profound intertwining of these critical elements at our upcoming seminar series.
Abstract
Terrorist activities aim to destabilise and challenge the status quo. But do they succeed? We propose to investigate this, by focusing on the notion of value resilience and by investigating the impact of terrorism on citizens willingness to pay taxes, or tax morale. We use France as a case study and exploit a terrorist attack that took place as an extensive household value survey was being collected, thus allowing us to compare average views in the population on tax-paying (and other related values) before and after the attack, using standard regression and RDD (Regression Discontinuity Design). Specifically, we focus on a terrorist attack that occurred at the end of March 2018 in the South of France, and we use the 2017 European Value Survey, which was collected from early March to mid-August 2018. Over a quarter of the interviews had taken place before the attack. Our analysis also goes beyond average effects and explore the polarisation of responses post attack. We find an insignificant effect of this attack on tax morale in the full sample. We also find a significant increase in the variance of tax morale after the attack. We further explore possible sources of heterogeneous response using a variety of sub-samples and respondents’ characteristics, evidencing a polarisation reflecting respondents left-right placement. In a country with relatively high-tax morale to start with, we conclude that terrorism has a negligible impact on citizen’s average willingness to pay taxes but polarises views in the population in a way that evidences strong value resilience.
Speaker
Elodie Douarin (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, London)
Convener/Organiser: Dr Luca Andriani
Contact name:
Luca Andriani
- Dr Elodie Douarin (University College London, UK)