Has COVID-19 vaccination success increased the marginal willingness to pay taxes?

Abstract

The COVID-19 vaccination campaign can be regarded as a public-sector success story. Given the shock caused by the pandemic, the highly visible and successful response of the public authorities in rolling out the vaccination might have elicited an increase in public trust. We test whether the vaccination process increased the marginal willingness to pay taxes (MWTP). Taking advantage of the different paths taken by the vaccination roll-out in Spain, we employ a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, complemented by an event study, to infer causality running from vaccination coverage to MWTP. We find an increase in MWTP caused by the good governance of the vaccination campaign.