Replication Data for: Tax compliance and social desirability bias of taxpayers: Experimental evidence from Indonesia

Identifying taxpayers who engage in non-compliant behavior is crucial for tax authorities to determine appropriate taxation schemes. However, since taxpayers have an incentive to conceal their true income, it is difficult for tax authorities to uncover such behavior (social desirability bias). Our study mitigates the bias in responses to sensitive questions by employing the list experiment technique, which allows us to identify the characteristics of taxpayers who engage in tax evasion. Using a dataset obtained from a tax office in Jakarta, Indonesia, we conducted a computer-assisted telephone interviewing survey in 2019. Our results revealed that 13 percent of the taxpayers, old, male, corporate employees, and members of a certain ethnic group had reported lower income than their true income on their tax returns. These findings suggest that our research design can be a useful tool for understanding tax evasion and for developing effective taxation schemes, that promote tax compliance.