Nudging with your child’s education. A field experiment on collecting municipal dues when enforcement is scant

We study whether nudging can improve payment morale for taxes and dues when enforcement through public institutions is low because of social reasons. In a natural field experiment involving the parents of children who attend lessons in a municipal music school, we find that nudging parents with appeals to children’s education improves the punctual payment of dues by about five percentage points, which is considerable given a base rate of only 48%. The effect persists even when the nudge is removed half a year later.