Do students behave like real taxpayers in the lab? Evidence from a real effort tax compliance experiment

•We run tax evasion experiments on three samples with varied tax filing experience.•Students are the least compliant sample, but most responsive to treatment changes.•Non-students are more compliant but non-responsive to treatment changes.•We find strong evidence of the bomb-crater effect only in the student sample.•We show sample differences in behavior are due to compliance norms outside the lab. We report on data from a real-effort tax compliance experiment using three subject pools: students, who do not pay income tax; company employees, whose income is reported by their employer; and self-employed taxpayers, who are responsible for filing and payment. While compliance behavior is unaffected by changes in the level of, or information about the audit probability, higher fines increase compliance. We find subject pool differences: self-assessed taxpayers are the most compliant, while students are the least compliant. Through a simple framing manipulation, we show that such differences are driven by norms of compliance from outside the lab.