Sarah Necker Visiting Researcher at ZEW

Dr. Sarah Necker was a visiting researcher in ZEW’s Research Department “Corporate Taxation and Public Finance” from 21 to 25 October 2019. She is Executive Research Associate at the Walter Eucken Institut in Freiburg. Her research interests lie in the field of applied economics and focus on the incentives for unethical or illegal behaviour. Currently, Sarah Necker is researching on how cheating has developed over time, while also studying the demand and supply of collaborative tax evasion/undeclared work.

During her stay, she worked on a study, using a laboratory experiment to examine how reductions of the tax liability up to certain thresholds, so-called notches, affect tax compliance. The experiment aims to disentangle the labour supply and evasion response in a notched tax system compared to a tax system without notches. She also examines how taxpayers with different incomes behave in the two systems.