The Influence Of Religious Belief On Tax Compliance

With the increasing population of religious belief in China,many scholars have studied this "religious fever",and this paper focuses on the impact of religious belief on tax compliance.That is,whether or not religious beliefs affect a person's values and therefore their tax compliance,and if so,in what ways.This is the purpose of this article.From the perspectives of theoretical analysis and empirical analysis,this paper attempts to systematically expound the influence of religious belief on tax compliance and its influencing mechanism,and further verify the theoretical hypothesis by means of nationally representative micro-survey data(CFPS).In the theoretical analysis,this paper takes "prospect theory" as the starting point.Different from the existing literature,this paper believes that the income sensitivity and loss sensitivity cannot be assumed to be equal simply for the sake of simplifying the model,because this will lead to the conclusion of the model being too out of reality.That is,there is no critical point,once higher,people would choose to fully comply with the tax,once lower,people would choose completely do not comply with the tax.Therefore,this paper believes that it is necessary to fully consider the case that the return sensitivity is not equal to the loss sensitivity.In addition,combining with the previous studies of scholars,this paper puts forward two ways of influence of religious belief on taxpayers' value judgment,namely,belief effect and organizational effect.Through a series of theoretical derivations,this paper believes that the belief effect is conducive to improving the tax compliance of taxpayers,but the effect of organization on taxpayers cannot be determined.In terms of empirical analysis,this paper uses the CFPS questionnaire to synthesize the variable of tax compliance,and conducts a regression analysis based on other data of the questionnaire.The results show that when respondents believe that religion is important,religious belief will have a positive impact on tax compliance.On the contrary,if religion is not considered important,there is no significant correlation between religious belief and tax compliance.What's more,this paper further decomposes religious belief and finds that the effect of belief has a positive effect on tax compliance,while the effect of organization is opposite.However,in general,the effect of belief is greater than the effect of organization.On the one hand,the above results are helpful for people to understand the relationship between religious belief and tax compliance,and on the other hand,they have decision-making reference value for the handling of religious issues.