Who Deserves a Tax Break and Why? Evidence on Preferences for Taxing Personal Characteristics

Last registered on October 07, 2024

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Who Deserves a Tax Break and Why? Evidence on Preferences for Taxing Personal Characteristics
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0014473
Initial registration date
October 04, 2024

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
October 07, 2024, 7:21 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
UniDistance Suisse

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
University of Zurich

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2024-10-07
End date
2025-10-07
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
In this experiment, we study whether people support using personal characteristics as a basis for taxation and uncover the underlying determinants of their support. We study this question with a general population sample of the U.S.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Senn, Julien and Krishna Srinivasan. 2024. "Who Deserves a Tax Break and Why? Evidence on Preferences for Taxing Personal Characteristics." AEA RCT Registry. October 07. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.14473-1.0
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention Start Date
2024-10-07
Intervention End Date
2025-10-07

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
For the policy proposals:

We elicit participants’ support for ten policy proposals using a 7-point scale, from “-3: Strongly oppose” to “+3: Strongly support.” We plan to analyze the following outcome variables:

1. Support_ip: Continuous measure of support by individual i for policy p (at the individual x policy level), ranging from -3 to +3.
2. BinSupport_ip: Binary measure of support by individual i for policy p (at the individual x policy level). The binary measure takes a value 1 if individual i displayed positive support for policy p (i.e., if support_ip >0), and zero otherwise.
3. Average support across all policies at the individual level
4. Share of policies supported at the individual level (share of policies for which BinSupport_ip=1)

For the vignette experiment:

We elicit participants’ support for tagging using a 7-point scale, from “-3: Strongly oppose” to “+3: Strongly support.” We plan to analyze the following outcome variables:

1. Continuous measure of support for tagging ranging from -3 to +3
2. Binary measure of support for tagging that takes a value of 1 if support for tagging in the vignette experiment is greater than 0 and 0 otherwise
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Sample selection:

We recruit participants from the provider Bilendi. Participants who fail the attention check or any of the three comprehension checks cannot proceed with the experiment. We exclude participants from the study when the demographic quotas have been met. Among those who completed the survey, we will exclude those who took the survey multiple times.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Software-based randomization (Qualtrics)
Randomization Unit
Individual
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
1
Sample size: planned number of observations
3000 participants.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
375 participants in each of the eight treatment cells.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
The Human Subjects Committee of the Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology at the University of Zurich
IRB Approval Date
2023-07-19
IRB Approval Number
2023-065