Work in Progress

Rebuilding the Social Compact (with Adnan Khan, Asim Khwaja, and Ben Olken) (AEA Registry Link, Short-run impacts PDF)

Abstract:  A significant challenge to the provision of local public services such as water, sanitation, waste removal, etc. in developing economies is the inability to raise adequate resources, especially through local taxation. In many countries the social compact, whereby citizens agree to pay taxes to fund government services that are then credibly and transparently delivered, is broken. A low willingness to pay taxes leads to low revenue collection and prevents adequate service provision, which in turn reduces willingness to pay and even leads to citizen disengagement from the state. In this project, we investigate whether strengthening the link between local collections and urban services can increase citizens’ willingness to pay for services, improve service delivery, and ultimately revitalize the social compact. 

It Takes a Village Election: Turnover and Performance in Local Bureaucracies

(with Sam Bazzi, Masyhur Hilmy, Benjamin Marx, and Andreas Stegmann) (Working Papers: World Bank, NBER, CEPR) 

Abstract: In many countries, local governments struggle with inefficiency and corruption, often perpetuated by entrenched elites. This paper explores how leadership changes affect local bureaucratic performance. Combining personnel and citizen surveys with a regression discontinuity design in a large sample of Indonesian villages, we show that turnovers in village elections revitalize local bureaucracies, disrupt nepotistic networks, and improve local government performance. Bureaucrats serving new leaders are more engaged and less likely to be tied to past or present village officials, resulting in a more responsive bureaucracy that interacts more with citizens and better understands their needs. This improves public service provision, measured in both administrative data and citizen surveys. Overall, our results show that leadership changes can mitigate elite capture and improve governance at the grassroots level.

Horizontal Inequity of Taxation: Citizen Perceptions and Policy Preferences (with Pierre Bachas, Christopher Hoy, and Anders Jensen) (AEA Registry Link, New draft soon)

Abstract: A large share of the workforce in developing countries is self-employed, a hard-to-tax segment compared to salaried employees. We study the perception of fairness of the tax system, focusing on the horizontal inequity between salaried and self-employed individuals, in five large low and middle-income countries. We conjecture that the prevalence of self-employment strengthens horizontal equity concerns, which in turn lowers demand for tax interventions, especially direct income taxation. To test this hypothesis, we conduct online surveys eliciting individual perception on horizontal and vertical equity, tax fairness, and how preferences relate to tax instruments. To test whether increased awareness of horizontal inequity affects tax preferences, we conduct a within-survey information treatment aimed at increasing the salience of this issue.

Evidence Transmission in Organizations (with Andreas Stegmann and Mattie Toma) (AEA Registry Link, New draft soon)

Improving Property Tax Collection with Computer Vision (with Sher Afghan Asad, Adnan Khan, Ben Olken, and Jie Zhou) 

Abstract:  Economic growth in developing countries is often limited by the state’s inability to raise tax revenue.  In many countries, tax administration systems rely on infrequently updated and out-of-date property tax valuations, and tax officials often employ significant discretion when assessing properties. These factors can lead to errors that could increase tax leakages or lower citizen trust in the state. This study addresses this challenge in two steps: first, by developing a computer vision algorithm that can use property images to predict property assessments and second, by testing how well the algorithm performs in identifying properties for reassessment.  

Changing Norms of Corruption among Future Public Servants (with Sam Bazzi, Masyhur Hilmy, Benjamin Marx, and Andreas Stegmann) (AEA Registry Link)

Motivating Civil Servants in Uruguay (with Andreas Stegmann) (AEA Registry Link)

Electoral Competition and Politician Behavior (PDF)

Publications

Building Trust in in the State with Information: Evidence from Urban Punjab (with Adnan Khan, Sanval Nasim, and Andreas Stegmann) 

Journal of Public Economics, October 2021, Volume 202, 104494.

Abstract: Can communication designed to increase support for government policy and shift perceptions of state capacity redress deep-rooted mistrust in state institutions? This paper finds providing information on past state effectiveness, highlighting citizens’ cooperation in enabling past effectiveness or appealing to religious authorities’ support for government policy have limited impact on support for policy, perceptions of state capacity and trust in the state in Pakistan. This holds true on average and across important dimensions of heterogeneity after comparing treatment effects to those induced by an experimenter demand treatment. This paper highlights the limits of using information to build trust in state institutions, and the importance of measuring experimenter demand.