Greener on the Other Side

The paper presented in this Mannheim Applied Seminar works with the government of the city of Manaus, Brazil to improve compliance with the municipal property tax. Specifically, the authors aim to understand the role that inequity – similar households being treated differently by tax policy – plays in determining compliance with the tax. They do this by combining a novel survey experiment raising the salience of horizontal inequity with rich administrative data on tax liabilities and tax compliance.