• Graduate program
    • Why Tinbergen Institute?
    • Program Structure
    • Courses
    • Course Registration
    • Facilities
    • Admissions
    • Recent PhD Placements
  • Research
  • News
  • Events
    • Summer School
      • Summer School
      • Behavioral Macro and Complexity
      • Climate Change
      • Econometrics and Data Science Methods for Business, Economics and Finance
      • Networks in Micro- and Macroeconomics
      • Business Data Science Summer School Program
    • Events Calendar
    • Events Archive
    • Tinbergen Institute Lectures
    • Conference: Consumer Search and Markets
    • Annual Tinbergen Institute Conference
  • Summer School
  • Alumni
  • Times

Weber, M. and Schram, A. (2017). The Non-Equivalence of Labour Market Taxes: A Real-Effort Experiment Economic Journal, 127(604):2187--2215.


  • Affiliated authors
    Arthur Schram, Matthias Weber
  • Publication year
    2017
  • Journal
    Economic Journal

Under full rationality, a labour market tax levied on employers and a corresponding income tax levied on employees are equivalent. With boundedly rational agents, this equivalence is no longer obvious. In a real-effort experiment, we study the effects of these taxes on preferences concerning the size of the public sector, subjective well-being, labor supply, and on-the-job performance. Our findings suggest that employer-side taxes induce preferences for a larger public sector. Subjective well-being is higher under employer-side taxes while labor supply is lower, at least at the extensive margin. We discuss three mechanisms that may underlie these results.