Ricardo Perez-Truglia

Who they are

His UCLA Anderson profile describes his work as behavioural, political and public economics. He studies how social interactions and information frictions shape economic and political decisions, with the aim of informing policymakers in developed and developing countries.

The topics listed under his research show a consistent method. Several of his projects take a question that is usually argued about and turn it into a randomised field experiment on real people. The profile lists work on whether tax avoidance by the wealthy is contagious, on how firms adopt technology after learning that peers have, on whether parents protest school taxes less often when they learn what share of taxes funds schools, on job seekers and negotiation, and on how businesses overestimate the chance of being audited. One listed item is a summary of the shaming study under the title Shaming of Tax Delinquents Works, with the figure of 34,334 letters.

The common thread is information. In many of these projects the intervention is a fact given to a person, about peers, about visibility or about audits, and the outcome is a behaviour that can be counted. That is the design of the tax-letter study.

Key papers

Shaming tax delinquents (2018)

Perez-Truglia and Troiano, Journal of Public Economics, 167, 120-137, NBER Working Paper 21264 (2015, revised 2018). The authors wrote to 34,334 delinquent taxpayers in three US states, who together owed about $500 million. They randomly varied the content of the letters to change how visible financial penalties, shaming and peer comparisons were. Their abstract reports that greater visibility of delinquency status increased payments among taxpayers owing less than $2,500, with no significant effect among those with larger debts. Financial reminders raised payment regardless of debt size, and information that neighbours were delinquent had no effect.

The abstract begins from a concern about shaming penalties: that they may fail, or even reduce compliance, by crowding out intrinsic motivation. A UCLA Anderson summary of the paper adds that the authors caution that shaming could alienate people, so that other tactics may be worth considering.

Key ideas

The core idea is that shaming can be studied as a variable instead of a slogan. By changing only what the letter says about who can see the debt, the study isolates visibility from the debt itself and from the financial penalty.

The result is narrow in a useful way. The effect appears for small debts and not for large ones, which fits a reading in which a person weighs the reputational cost of being on a list against the money owed. This site notes that the same pattern is also what a plain price account would predict, so the experiment does not separate shame from the cost of being listed.

The outcome measured is payment. It is a single act that removes a name from a list, and the study does not follow what the same people did afterwards. For a question about whether public shaming makes people behave better in general, it is evidence about one behaviour in one setting, and it is strong evidence for that. Paired with the survey of tax offenders by Kristina Murphy and Nathan Harris and the jail study led by June Tangney, it shows that the question has three different answers depending on whether shame is treated as a trait, an experience of being treated, or public exposure.

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