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Field
Intervention (Public)
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Before
The municipality is building the Túnel de Hornos, a large local infrastructure project financed through municipal revenues, and we partnered with the local government to inform property taxpayers about this tax–benefit link. We are mailing letters to the universe of roughly 100,000 property tax accounts that made the tunnel salient and explicitly connected it to funding from the property tax. The core variation is in framing and personalization: relative to a baseline letter with standard payment information, treatment letters highlight the tunnel as a municipal investment and emphasize the recipient’s geographic proximity to the project to make the individual benefit more concrete. We then measure how these informational frames affect compliance and payment behavior, and whether responses vary with distance to the tunnel.
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After
The municipality is building the Túnel de Hornos, a large local infrastructure project financed through municipal revenues, and we partnered with the local government to inform property taxpayers about this tax–benefit link. We are mailing letters to the universe of roughly 100,000 property tax accounts that made the tunnel salient and explicitly connected it to funding from the property tax. The core variation is in framing and personalization: relative to a baseline letter with standard payment information, treatment letters highlight the tunnel as a municipal investment and emphasize the recipient’s geographic proximity to the project to make the individual benefit more concrete. We then measure how these informational frames affect compliance and payment behavior, and whether responses vary with distance to the tunnel.
--- AMMENDMENT - April 2026 - Survey
As a complement to the results of the physical letter experiment, we pre-register an online survey designed to identify the mechanisms behind the observed compliance effects. The survey targets approximately 15,000 taxpayers drawn from the subset of accounts that did not receive the physical letter. The survey embeds a randomized information treatment (3 arms):
- Control: No mention of the tunnel.
- T1: Informed about the tunnel construction, no financing mention.
- T2: Same as T1, plus explicit statement that the project is financed with municipal funds (TSG).
Pre-treatment questions measure satisfaction with municipal services, unconditional and conditional tax morale, and frequency of crossing the railway tracks (reciprocity proxy). The unconditional/conditional tax morale pair classifies respondents into civic-minded or not types, enabling heterogeneity analysis by taxpayer type. In the T1 and T2 arms, a prior awareness question about the tunnel is asked before the information treatment, allowing us to test whether effects differ between those already informed and those receiving new information. Post-treatment outcomes capture perceived service delivery, trust in spending, and conditional tax morale. Comparison of T1 vs T2 identifies the fiscal attribution channel; heterogeneity by railway crossing frequency and distance to the tunnel identifies reciprocity; treatment effects on service delivery beliefs. Survey respondents are linked to administrative tax records, additionally allowing us to test whether attitudinal shifts translate into behavioral changes in compliance in future payments. Distance heterogeneity is analyzed using the same bins as the letter experiment, enabling direct comparison of survey-based mechanism evidence with administrative compliance effects from the original intervention.
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Field
Intervention (Hidden)
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Before
The experiment includes the following treatments on the front of the letter:
Control (C): a letter providing information on payment methods only, with no additional content beyond a neutral visual featuring the municipality logo.
Treatment 1 (T1): the same letter as Control, replacing the neutral visual with a rendering of the tunnel under construction and adding text stating that the tunnel is being built and financed with municipal funds.
Treatment 2 (T2): identical to Treatment 1, with the addition of personalized information reporting the distance from the recipient’s property to the tunnel.
The reverse side of the letter contains standard information from the tax administration, including discounts, payment options, and QR and bar codes required to settle the tax liability.
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After
The experiment includes the following treatments on the front of the letter:
Control (C): a letter providing information on payment methods only, with no additional content beyond a neutral visual featuring the municipality logo.
Treatment 1 (T1): the same letter as Control, replacing the neutral visual with a rendering of the tunnel under construction and adding text stating that the tunnel is being built and financed with municipal funds.
Treatment 2 (T2): identical to Treatment 1, with the addition of personalized information reporting the distance from the recipient’s property to the tunnel.
The reverse side of the letter contains standard information from the tax administration, including discounts, payment options, and QR and bar codes required to settle the tax liability.
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