Professor Raymond Duch on Taxation and the Newest Tendencies in Student Education at Oxford
On Tuesday, December 10, 2013, Raymond M. Duch (Nuffield College, University of Oxford), PhD, Official Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, spoke on ‘Why we Cheat: Experimental Evidence on Tax Compliance’ within the Higher School of Economics/ New Economic School research seminar on political economy. Raymond Duch gave a special interview for the HSE news service.
— You are the Director of Centre for Experimental Social Sciences at the University of Oxford. What are the priorities for the Centre?
— The Centre priorities are to promote the experimental research by the social science community at the University of Oxford. The CESS provides facilities for conducting lab experiments but also provides the facilities and technical support for online experiments conducted anywhere in the world. We also support and assist in the conducting of field experiments. The Centre conducts a regular colloquium series that invites researchers with a new experimental project to present their ideas and research designed to experienced researchers who in turn give guidance and feedback on the experimental design and execution strategies.
— What are the newest tendencies in a relationship between a teacher, a tutor and a student?
— One of the newest tendencies in student education that I have noticed at Oxford is our efforts to engage undergraduates in more intensive quantitative training. Students who are undergraduates focusing on political science, for example, have not been getting adequate training in basic statistical analysis and yet this is becoming increasingly important in our society. There is now an initiative to improve this at Oxford — it is sponsored by the Nuffield Foundation and the British ESRC.
— You presented a report with the results for an ongoing set of experiments designed to help understand individual preferences for redistributive policies, specifically taxation. Could you, please, share with the major findings of this research?
— Here are some of the conclusions. Tax cheating increases with earnings, tax compliance drops significantly when tax rates rise beyond approximately 30% tax rate, individuals appear to favor redistributive taxes in countries that have a progressive distribution of benefits and high taxation. Also individuals appear to favour redistributive taxes in countries with regressive tax rates + regressive benefits + high taxation – this would be Sweden for example. Individuals in countries with regressive taxation and regressive distribution of benefits (countries such as Germany) – seem to be less supportive of redistributive taxation – and hence we might expect less tax compliance.
— What's next on your research plate and in collaboration with the HSE?
— I am currently replicating in Moscow at HSE a set of experiments on tax compliance that I conducted in the UK — we expect to complete this in the next couple of weeks and to compare the results with the similar experiments that I conducted at Oxford.
— Good luck and we are looking forward for the results of these joint experiments.
Anna Chernyakhovskaya, specially for the HSE news service
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