Willing to share? Tax compliance and gender in Europe and America

What is it about?

Studies examining the effects of gender on honesty, deceptive behavior, pro-sociality, and risk aversion, often find significant differences between men and women. The present study contributes to the debate by exploiting one of the largest tax compliance experiments to date in a highly controlled environment conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. Our expectation was that the differences between men’s and women’s behavior would correlate broadly with the degree of gender equality in each country. Where social, political and cultural gender equality is greater we expected behavioral differences between men and women to be smaller. In contrast, our evidence reveals that women are significantly more compliant than men in all countries. Furthermore, these patterns are quite consistent across countries in our study. In other words, the difference between men’s and women’s behavior is not significantly different in more gender neutral countries than in more traditional societies.

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Why is it important?

Although gender is often found to have significant effects on tax compliance, it is often treated as a residual predictor. Here we place gender at the center of our study. We utilize the largest tax compliance experiment conducted anywhere in the world to uncover that men behave differently and are less tax compliant than women in four countries.