Labour supply in presence of taxation financing public services. An experimental approach

The paper illustrates the results of some experiments aiming to test the effect of taxation on the effort. Differently from previous experiments (Levy-Garboua et al., Sutter and Weck-Hannemann, Swenson), in our research the revenue of taxation is not depleted but employed, more realistically, to finance welfare provisions. The result is no more a reduction of effort, as in previous experiments, but a slight increase. This behavior is coherent with a theoretical model suggested by Bird in 2001.