2020. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 135; 4: 1849–1903. Paper. Appendix. Related links: Vox Dev, ICTD, Law360, World Bank.
This paper provides evidence from a fragile state that citizens demand more of a voice in the government when it tries to tax them. I examine a field experiment randomizing property tax collection…
Read Morewith Balan P, Bergeron A, Tourek G. 2022. American Economic Review 112(3): 136. Paper. VoxDev.
We study a randomized policy experiment assigning neighborhoods of a Congolese city — spanning 45,162 properties — to tax collection by state agents or by city chiefs. Chief collection raised property tax compliance by 3.3 percentage points, increasing revenues by 43%.…
Read Morewith Bergeron A, Tourek G. 2024. Econometrica 92(4): 1163-1193. Paper. JPAL Summary.
We study a policy experiment in the D.R. Congo that randomly assigned 38,028 property owners to the status quo tax rate or to a rate reduction. This variation in tax liabilities reveals that the status quo rate lies above the revenue-maximizing tax rate…
Read Morewith Bergeron A, Bessone P, Kabeya JK, and Tourek G. Working Paper. VoxDev Summary. Conditionally accepted, American Economic Review.
This paper investigates whether a low-capacity state can raise more tax revenue through the optimal assignment of its tax collectors. We study the two-stage random assignment of property tax collectors (i) into teams, and (ii) to neighborhoods in a large Congolese city…
Read Morewith Bergeron A, Ngindu EK, Tourek G. Working Paper. Winner of IIPF Peggy and Richard Musgrave Prize 2023.
Delegating tax collection to informal leaders could raise revenue but runs the risk of undermining the local accountability of those leaders. We investigate this possibility by exploiting whether city chiefs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were randomly assigned to collect property taxes in 2018.
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