Replication Data for: Compensation and Tax Fairness: Evidence from Four Countries

This paper uses a conjoint survey experiment fielded in the US, Australia, Chile and Argentina to develop and test the compensatory theory of tax fairness, which states that higher taxes on the rich can be used to compensate for other benefits unequally granted by the state. Drawing on social psychology, the paper argues that evidence of preferential treatment by the state violates well established fairness principles, and shows experimentally that it leads to the use of taxation as a means of restoring equality not only in crisis times, irrespective of wealth, and across a variety of settings. The paper makes two important contributions: it provides the first direct, causal evidence of the importance of compensatory arguments for tax preferences, and presents unconfounded estimates of the effect of more established fairness considerations as benchmarks against which to compare the importance of compensatory arguments