Public Transportation, Fare Policies and Tax Salience

Abstract

This paper empirically tests whether property owners react to the salience of taxes in terms of their consumption of public services. Exploiting a policy change that reduced fares on public transport in various municipalities of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, we find that salience of the tax to finance the fare reduction increases the consumption of public transportation. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis that the salience of taxes may affect the consumption behavior of taxpayers and our main results contribute to previous empirical evidence relating tax salience and consumption behavior regarding public services.