Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries face limited capacity to enforce tax payments combined with various obstacles that reduce tax compliance. Domestic revenues need to be mobilized to finance growing needs demanded by population growth, rising debt levels and declining development aid, often amidst widespread tax evasion, corruption and weak institutions. This paper examines the scope of fairly inexpensive text message “nudges” to improve voluntary compliance and raise tax revenue in a large and diverse East African economy, Tanzania. Six different behavioural messages were sent monthly to a randomized sample of income taxpayers in December 2023 – June 2024. Results confirmed by extensive robustness checks show little if any effect on taxpayer activity or taxes paid. In the absence of other changes, simple behavioral nudges in the form of text messages appear to have no impact on tax compliance.

We study how marginal effective tax rates of means-tested social welfare programs affect labor supply in the formal and informal sector. In a conjoint experiment, German welfare recipients report which jobs they might accept under different policy scenarios, varied in a between-subjects treatment design. We find that in addition to their negative effect on labor supply in the formal sector, higher transfer withdrawal rates increase the probability that job offers in the informal sector are accepted. These results provide novel evidence on the adverse implications of high transfer withdrawal rates and highlight the need for reform initiatives aiming at stronger labor supply incentives.

We study how newspaper narratives shape public beliefs and policy preferences during a period of high inflation in Germany. We conducted an online survey experiment with a broadly representative sample of 4,150 respondents, half of them randomly assigned to one of three inflation narrative treatments: 1) pent-up demand, 2) the energy-price crisis, or 3) corporate price gouging. We find strong baseline political polarization in support for inflation-mitigating policies, while respondents broadly agree on the distributional consequences of inflation. Pre-existing individual causal attributions about inflation correlate with inflation inequality beliefs and policy preferences but prove largely resistant to experimental updating. Among right-leaning respondents, however, exposure to inflation narratives substantially increase policy support, reducing the baseline partisan gap by up to 80%. This effect is concentrated among moderate-right, AfD-leaning respondents, suggesting that, when confronted with inflation as an economic problem, government skepticism is channeled into demand for stronger state protection.

In several cases secessionism goes together with violence. This paper uses a dynamic model to discuss the incentives of moderates and extremists, both agitating for independence. The extremists are willing to conduct terror and I argue that there are two types of extremists, those who are willing to compromise, and those who are not. In the equilibrium of the model, the moderates have a larger incentive to suppress terror and the extremists who are willing to compromise have smaller incentives to conduct terror when the probability of reaching an agreement is higher. The extremists who are not willing to compromise, however, have larger incentives to conduct terror when the probability of reaching an agreement is high.