The Economic Psychology of Tax Compliance and Charitable Giving: A Comparative Analysis and Research Agenda

Finding mechanisms to promote prosocial spending behavior is fundamentalto the well-being of our societies and is more urgent than ever in a time of keyglobal challenges, including social and economic inequalities. Tax payment andcharitable giving can be seen as two complementary ways to financially providefor the common good and, like many other social dilemmas, they both involve aconflict between what is good for oneself and what is good for others. The aimof the present article is to perform a comparative analysis of the main determi-nants of tax behavior and charitable giving to identify some common anteceden-ts to gain insight to promote pro-social financial decisions at large. Despite theintrinsic differences, several commonalities were found, thus suggesting a trans-cending common core. By identifying well-established literature and under-in-vestigated areas, a new research agenda is formulated.