ON THE EXTERNAL VALIDITY OF LABORATORY TAX COMPLIANCE EXPERIMENTS

• Published in: Economic inquiry Vol. 53; no. 2; pp. 1170 - 1186
• Main Authors: Alm, James, Bloomquist, Kim M., McKee, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, USA Wiley Periodicals, Inc 01.04.2015; Wiley-Blackwell; Blackwell Publishers Ltd; Western Economic Association
• Subjects: Behavior; Compliance; Consumer behavior; Decision making; Discourse analysis; Experiments; Fiscal policy; Laboratories; Laws, regulations and rules; Political economy; Public finance; Statistics; Steuermoral; Student behavior; Students; Taxpayer compliance; Test; USA; Validation studies; Validity; Verhaltensökonomik; United States
• ISSN: 0095-2583; 1465-7295
• DOI: 10.1111/ecin.12196

An essential issue for laboratory experiments to inform policy debates is the “external validity” of the experimental results; that is, does behavior in the laboratory apply to behavior that occurs in the naturally occurring world? We examine this issue of external validity in the specific context of laboratory experiments on tax compliance, using two different types of evidence. We find that the behavioral patterns of subjects in the laboratory conform to those of individuals making a similar decision in naturally occurring settings. We also find that the behavioral responses of students are largely the same as those of nonstudents in identical experiments (JEL C9, H0, H3)