Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Studies On The Effects Of Sympathy And Religious Education On Income Redistribution Preferences, Charitable Donations, And Law-Abiding Behavior, Roberta D. Calvet

Economics Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the impact of moral emotions (sympathy and empathy) and religious education on individual behavior. This dissertation is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter examines the effect of sympathy and empathy on tax compliance. We run a series of experiments in which we employ methods such as priming, the Davis Empathic Concern scale, and questions about frequency of prosocial behaviors in the past year in order to promote and to identify empathy and sympathy in subjects. We observe the subjects’ decisions in a series of one-shot tax compliance game presented at …