Benno Torgler

Queensland University of Technology | QUT · School of Economics and Finance

New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study addresses this gap in the literature by empirically exploring...

This paper investigates the importance of trust in international institutions for the development of tax morale by focussing on interactions between trust in the national government and trust in the European Union (EU) or trust in the United Nations (UN). Using large-scale survey data from European countries, we provide evidence that all three trus...

This paper reports on a laboratory experiment designed specifically to test the influence of national pride on tax honesty while using a physiological marker to observe emotional responses to patriotic priming. Participants were exposed to one of three framing videos before earning income in a real effort task and were given the chance to declare t...

We study the long-term effects of the Cultural Revolution, characterised by widespread violence, summary executions and chaos, on a set of trust outcomes among people surveyed by the China Survey in 2008. We find that the revolution, identified by cohort-specific exposure to excess deaths at the county level, has a significant long-term impact on t...

Commemorative stamps have a place in the cultural, economic, and geopolitical status of a nation; and the nature of what is printed on stamps is very much a reflection of the culture, regime, and values of a country. Whilst commemorative stamps can be a source of celebration for monuments, flora and fauna, and key points in a nation’s history; they...

Commemorative stamps have a place in the cultural, economic, and geopolitical status of a nation; and the nature of what is printed on stamps is very much a reflection of the culture, regime, and values of a country. Whilst commemorative stamps can be a source of celebration for monuments, flora and fauna, and key points in a nation's history; they...

The ambiguous phenomenon of corruption has long been the cause of great theoretical debate in economics. By using Structural Equation Modelling, with the two types of corruption as a latent variable, this paper employs causal and indicative variables to the Latin American region to test for rent seeking and systemic corruption during 1980–2018. The...

Politics is a social endeavour and highly visible to the consumer (in this case, the citizen). It is therefore not surprising that a potential beauty premium has been explored in politics. However, most studies have focused on how beauty influences the success of candidates running for office, this is a distributive outcome rather than a process or...

The global under-supply of sperm and oocyte donors is a serious concern for assisted reproductive medicine. Research has explored self-selected populations of gamete donors and their ex-post rationalisations of why they chose to donate. However, such studies may not provide the necessary insight into why the majority of people do not donate. Utilis...

Despite an extensive body of research indicating multifaceted advantages for employees deemed physically attractive, factors that limit or even negate the attractiveness premium have not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we are interested in whether a rich set of physical appearance factors matter when performance information is transp...

We analyze the effect of electoral turnout on incum-bency advantages by exploring mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria. Mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the state government announced an official state of emergency. In the seco...

Self-reported subjective judgments about well-being, mood, or mental state are at the core of analytical and empirical tools in many social sciences. However, technological advances (particularly in neuroscience) are opening new ways of monitoring physiological processes through non-intrusive means. Such dense continuous data provide new and fruitf...

New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study addresses this gap in the literature by empirically exploring...

The causes, contexts, and consequences of taxpaying behaviour are perpetually important topics for policy-makers and researchers. Over previous decades, the orientation of tax policy and research has moved from an economics of crime approach to a collaborative, partnership and customer-focused approach. This chapter will examine how the emerging ev...

Research question Despite the potential importance of awards as a possible career catalyst, research on awards is still in its infancy, specifically in sports management. Here, we address this shortcoming in the sports economics and management literature by exploring data from youth association football. Research methods Estimating different probi...

Despite a solid foundation of women’s career progression research, the role of personality and psychosocial characteristics in explaining objective career success is not yet fully understood. Today, two alternative perspectives on the role of gender and personality in career advancement prevail. On the one hand, the gender-invariant role demands pe...

Increasing the tax compliance of self-employed business owners—particularly of trade-specific service providers such as those involved in construction and repair work—remains an ongoing challenge for tax authorities. From a compliance point of view, cash transactions are particularly problematic when services are paid for on the spot, as these exch...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments struggled to find the right balance between re-strictive measures to contain the spread of the virus, and the effects of these measures on people’s psychological wellbeing. This paper investigates the relationship between limitations to mobility and mental health for the UK population during the COVID-19 pa...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

As artificial intelligence (AI) thrives and propagates through modern life, a key question to ask is how to include humans in future AI? Despite human involvement at every stage of the production process from conception and design through to implementation, modern AI is still often criticized for its “black box” characteristics. Sometimes, we do no...

Using data for 387 Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, or physiology/medicine from 1901 to 2000, this study focuses on the relation between the timing of prestigious awards and human longevity. In particular, it uses a linear regression model to examine how a winner’s longevity is affected by (1) the age at which the prestigious award is won...

Despite the general usefulness of citations as a sort of test of the value of one’s work in the marketplace of ideas, journals and publishers tend to use alternative bases of judgment, namely committees, in selecting candidates for the conferral of journals’ best paper awards. Given that recognition—sometimes in the form of compensation and on othe...

We study the long-term effects of the Cultural Revolution, a dramatic period in the recent history of China, characterised by widespread violence, summary executions and chaos, on a set of trust outcomes among people surveyed by the China Survey in 2008. We find that the revolution, which we identify with the interaction between cohort and excess d...

The history of AI in economics is long and winding, much the same as the evolving field of AI itself. Economists have engaged with AI since its beginnings, albeit in varying degrees and with changing focus across time and places. In this study, we have explored the diffusion of AI and different AI methods (e.g., machine learning, deep learning, neu...

Despite an extensive body of research indicating multifaceted advantages for employees deemed physically attractive, factors that limit or even negate the attractiveness premium have not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we are particularly interested in whether a rich set of physical appearance factors matter when performance informat...

In this paper I discuss how Law and Economics can benefit from incorporating some insights from Public Choice into their analyses. Within this argument, I examine the evolution of experimental methods by looking at laboratory, field, and natural experiments; and conducting a very simple scientometrics analysis on the relative frequency of experimen...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have struggled to find the right balance between restrictive measures to contain the spread of the virus, and the effects of these measures on people's psychological wellbeing. This paper investigates the relationship between limitations to mobility and mental health for British population during the COVID-...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

Using data for 387 Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, or physiology/medicine from 1901 to 2000, this study focuses on the relation between the timing of prestigious awards and human longevity. In particular, it examines how a winner's longevity is affected by (1) the age at which the prestigious award is won, (2) the total number of prestig...

Love of family and loyalty to country are warm-blooded motivations that can impact the human migration decision. Our social ties and allegiances reflect where we choose to live, work, pay taxes, and contribute to community. The migration literature typically examines why people move from one place to another; in contrast, we look at why people choo...

We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialisation affect in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City on two groups of high school...

COVID-19 has had far-reaching global effects on the health and wellbeing of individuals on every continent. The economic and financial market response has been equally disastrous with high levels of volatility observed. This study explores the temporal relations between structural breaks, market volatility and government stay-at-home policy interve...

Vaccination against COVID-19 and other diseases is a pressing public health issue. We hypothesize that a short-term orientation (impatience) – as it heavily discounts the future benefits of actions taken today – leads to lower rates of vaccination. Using a recently constructed, experimentally validated measure of patience, we document four results...

The history of AI in economics is long and winding, much the same as the evolving field of AI itself. Economists have engaged with AI since its beginnings, albeit in varying degrees and with changing focus across time and places. In this study, we have explored the diffusion of AI and different AI methods (e.g., machine learning, deep learning, neu...

This study provides a quantitative assessment of the willingness to pay to avoid water use restrictions taking into account psychological, attitudinal and behavioural influences. We analyse determinants of households’ willingness to pay to ensure a continuous water supply in Brisbane, Australia. The results show that in addition to socio-economic v...

Does inadequate risk communication during uncertain times trigger the rise of conspiratorial ideas? We hypothesize that, where government COVID-19 risk communication started early, as measured by the number of days between the start of the communication campaign and the first case in the country, citizens are less likely to turn to conspiratorial e...

As artificial intelligence (AI) thrives and propagates through modern life, a key question to ask is how to include humans in future AI? Despite human-involvement at every stage of the production process from conception and design through to implementation, modern AI is still often criticized for its "black box" characteristics. Sometimes, we do no...

The field of behavioral taxation dates back at least to the 1950s. In this contribution I will explore the opportunities and challenges in the area, with a particular focus on tax compliance. I will focus on the data required to make further progress, discussing what can be improved when working with surveys and how the field could benefit from ope...

The ambiguous phenomenon of corruption has long been the cause of great theoretical debate in economics. By using Structural Equation Modelling, with the two types of corruption as a latent variable, this paper employs causal and indicative variables specific to the Latin American region to test for rent seeking and systemic corruption in the perio...

The current COVID-19 pandemic is a global, exogenous shock, impacting individuals' decision making and behavior allowing researchers to test theories of personality by exploring how traits, in conjunction with individual and societal differences, affect compliance and cooperation. Study 1 used Google mobility data and nation-level personality data...

Our ambitious reading group (started in 2017) will continue in 2021 (after the COVID-19 break), with a new set of books and topics. However, this year will also revisit several books from the previous three years of reading groups (see lists for 2017, 2018, and 2019). Combining both the old and the new will result in a heavy reading load. As usual,...

The empirical question of voting preferences and how these may change (swing) is yet to be answered, as there is little first-hand microeconomic evidence on swing voting. We focus on the interactions between voters’ age and political cynicism. Towards this end, we apply a stated and revealed preference framework to assess swing voting, using data f...

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected over 12,000 responses from a survey of scientists, who were asked to express their opinions on immunity certificates (also called “immunity passports”) as a potential instrument to lessen the impact of the crisis. Overall, we find that scientists perceive immunity certificates as favorabl...

Although understanding how multiculturalism shapes society is imperative in today's globalized world, insights on certain behavior domains remain limited, including those on tax compliance among domestic versus foreign taxpayers. Our meta-study of laboratory tax experiments analyzes over 50,000 tax declaration decisions by almost 5,000 subjects ent...

Although violence in healthcare settings has become a common occurrence worldwide, there is limited evidence on the spillover effects of patient violence on physicians' medical decisions. Utilizing microdata on inpatients from a major public hospital, we investigated how extreme patient violence—the murder of a physician in China—affected physician...

In this chapter, we ask (conceptually and methodologically) what exactly is behavioural economics and what are its roots? And further, what may we have missed along the way? We argue that revisiting “classical” behavioural economics concepts and methods will benefit the wider behavioural economics program by questioning its yardstick approach to...

Background The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vast differences in approaches to the control and containment of coronavirus across the world and has demonstrated the varied success of such approaches in minimizing the transmission of coronavirus. While previous studies have demonstrated high predictive power of incorporating air trave...

Because sexual attraction is a key driver of human mate choice and reproduction, we descriptively assess relative sex differences in the level of attraction individuals expect in the aesthetic, resource, and personality characteristics of potential mates. As a novelty we explore how male and female sexual attractiveness preference changes across ag...

Sporting events can be seen as controlled, real-world, miniature laboratory environments, approaching the idea of "holding other things equal" when exploring the implications of decisions, incentives, and constraints in a competitive setting (Goff and Tollison 1990, Torgler 2009). Thus, a growing number of studies have used sports data to study dec...

Self-confidence has long been regarded as one of the key qualities in determining entrepreneurial success. In markets with uncertainty, like crowdfunding, entrepreneurial confidence is an important signal that lowers the information imbalance for potential investors. However, current literature on confidence is limited in three ways; first is the l...

Corruption literature within economics has long returned ambiguous results with no concise cause or impact of corruption identified. This meta-analysis aims to find synergy within the corruption literature by assessing macroeconomic empirical studies that evaluate whether corruption 'greases or sands' the wheels of economic development. The meta-an...

AI and Big Data provide opportunities and challenges with respect to how we achieve safety in livable smart cities. In this contribution, we look at set of aspects that are important at the city level; namely, how urban analytics and digital technologies can be used; how crime safety is influenced by predictive policing; how city planning and urban...

Despite the great promises and potential of quantum computing, the full range of possibilities and practical applications is not yet clear. In this contribution, we highlight the potential for quantum theories and computation to reignite the art and science of expert systems and knowledge engineering. With their grounding in uncertainty and unpredi...

Despite a solid foundation of women’s career progression research, the role of personality and psychosocial characteristics in explaining objective career success is not yet fully understood. Structural underrepresentation of female executives at board levels remains an issue in both Europe in general and Germany in particular. Today, two alternati...

In this article, we contribute to the emerging literature on the potential determinants of football spectator no-show behavior by analyzing disaggregated data capturing season ticket holder (STH) behavior outside the German market for the first time. Intriguingly, our empirical analysis of a unique panel dataset – containing distinct admission deci...

This paper begins with a discussion on James Buchanan’s suggestion to replace the word “economics” with “symbiotics”, viewing human behavior through the window of exchange rather than choice. Although our current textbooks – such as those by Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson, and John A. List (Microeconomics and Macroeconomics) – tend to over-emphasize...

In this article, we argue for a novel adaptation of the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) to proactive incidence prevention in the public health and in particular, during and in response to COVID-19. HFACS is a framework of causal categories of human errors typically applied for systematic retrospective incident analysis in h...