Research
Academic journal articles
Property Tax Compliance in Tanzania: Can Nudges Help? (Economic Development and Cultural Change, expected 2025) with David K. Evans, Vincenzo Di Maro and Fredrick Manang (CGD Working Paper)
Are age-of-marriage laws enforced? Evidence from developing countries (Journal of Development Economics, 2023) with Theo Talbot [Online Appendix] [Replication Data]
The Effect of Increasing Human Capital Investment on Economic Growth and Poverty: A Simulation Exercise (Journal of Human Capital, 2020) with David N. Weil [Replication Data]
Tribe or Title? The Effect of Coethnic Neighbors on the Demand for Formal Property Rights in a Tanzanian Slum (Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2020)
Illicit Financial Flows: Concepts, Measurement, and Evidence (World Bank Research Observer, 2020)
Small Price Incentives Increase Women’s Access to Land Titles in Tanzania (Journal of Development Economics, 2016) with Daniel Ayalew Ali, Klaus Deininger, Stefan Dercon, Justin Sandefur and Andrew Zeitlin
Book chapters
De-risking: An Unintended Negative Consequence of AML/CFT Regulation in The Palgrave Handbook of Criminal and Terrorism Financing Law [eds. King, Walkerand Gurulé] with Vijaya Ramachandran and Matt Juden
Ongoing projects:
Using leaked bank account data on offshore wealth to understand adherence to and the impact of automatic-exchange-of-information (AEOI) regimes with Jeanne Bomare
Understanding tax avoidance promotion schemes in the UK with Arun Advani,David Burgherr and Andy Summers
Who owns Dubai real estate? with Annette Alstadsæter, Bluebery Planterose, Gabriel Zucman, and Andreas Økland [Research note]
Working Papers:
The End of Londongrad? The Impact of Beneficial Ownership Transparency on Offshore Investment in UK Property with Florian M. Hollenbach and David Szakonyi
(Latest version) (UNU-WIDER Working Paper)
UK property markets are thought to be a common destination for corrupt and criminal assets, who often invest through offshore shell companies. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we study the impact of the introduction of a policy in the UK intended to eliminate the anonymous ownership of property by requiring offshore companies to file their ultimate beneficial owners on public register. We find that new purchases and sales by companies based in tax havens fell substantially following government announcements that the policy would be introduced that year, and further declines following the establishment of a register of ownership. While the policy has effectively led the offshore market to stall, between between £46-80 billion worth of UK real estate is still owned by companies based in tax havens, most of which have yet to comply with their reporting obligations. We do not find strong evidence of price effects nor substitution into ownership through suspicious domestic companies, although larger movements may manifest as firms react to the finalization of the policy in January 2023.
The impact of beneficial ownership transparency on illicit purchases of U.S. property with Florian M. Hollenbach and David Szakonyi [Submitted]
Brookings working paper series; Blog
High value real estate is a popular destination for corrupt and criminal assets, in part caused by limited oversight and lack of transparency in real estate transactions. In response to these concerns, the U.S. Treasury began implementing a series of Geographic Targeting Orders (GTOs) in 2016, forcing corporate buyers making all-cash purchases in targeted counties to report the company’s ultimate beneficial owner. To estimate the causal effect of beneficial ownership transparency on these types of purchases, we combine data on millions of real estate transactions over the period 2014-2019 with a staggered difference-in-differences design. Our analysis suggests the absence of an aggregate effect of the GTOs on corporate all-cash purchases in targeted counties, as well as little evidence of attempts to evade the program. We contend that the lack of overt enforcement and validation of the ownership information failed to create a sufficient deterrent effect to drive out participation in the sector by illicit actors.
The Impact of Tax Blacklisting (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 2023)
This paper estimates the policy and economic impacts of a European Union–led effort to review and “blacklist” jurisdictions based on their compliance with international standards designed to curb corporate profit shifting and private tax evasion. Using a combination of regression discontinuity and difference-and-difference methods, there is evidence of only limited improvements in tax governance four years after the inception of the list. There is also no clear evidence that the listing exercise had any impact on offshore wealth or shifted profits, largely because the bulk of jurisdictions that host both of these were not targeted by the European Union. The results suggest that “coercive” efforts to reduce global tax evasion and avoidance will struggle without better targeting and enforcement.
This paper uses account data leaked from an Isle of Man bank to investigate the characteristics of individuals and firms that store their money in tax havens. Using internal documents that assign the ultimate ownership of companies and trusts that held deposits at the bank, I establish three things: first, most customers are from rich countries and are likely to be from the upper end of the income and wealth distributions of those countries. Second, I show that a non-negligible amount of offshore wealth is connected to a small number of political elites (so called politically-exposed persons). On average, these accounts have substantially higher balances and are more likely to receive payments from other tax havens, which is consistent with politically-exposed persons having access to more resources than the average offshore client while also desiring to obscure that ownership. Finally, I show that a substantial proportion of bank deposits are obscured from publicly-available statistics published by the Bank of International Settlements which are commonly used to measure offshore wealth. When I correctly assign deposits to their ultimate beneficial owner, offshore bank deposits owned by residents of tax havens drops by up to 32% and deposits held by residents of non-havens doubles. I conclude with recommendations on how reporting requirements need to change to improve the ability of regulators and the research community to detect and counter illicit finance.
Peer effects in the demand for property rights: experimental evidence from urban Tanzania (Latest Version) (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper)
This paper investigates the presence of endogenous peer effects in the adoption of formal property rights. Using data from a unique land titling experiment held in an unplanned settlement in Dar es Salaam, the analysis finds a strong, positive impact of neighbor adoption on the household’s choice to purchase a land title. The paper also shows that this relationship holds in a separate, identical experiment held a year later in a nearby community, as well as in administrative data for more than 160,000 land parcels in the same city. Although the exact channel is undetermined, the evidence points toward complementarities in the reduction in expropriation risk, as peer effects are strongest between households living close to each other and there is some evidence that peer effects are strongest for households most concerned with expropriation. The results show that, within the Tanzanian context, households will reinforce each other’s decisions to enter formal tenure systems.
The Impact of Anti-Money Laundering Regulation on Payment Flows: Evidence From SWIFT Data with Samantha Cook, Kimmo Soramäki and Divyanshi Wadhwa
(Center for Global Development Working Paper)
Regulatory pressure on international banks to fight money laundering (ML) and terrorist financing (TF) increased substantially in the past decade. At the same time there has been a rise in the number of complaints of banks denying transactions or closing the accounts of customers either based in high risk countries or attempting to send money there, a process known as de-risking. In this paper, we investigate the impact of an increase in regulatory risk, driven by the inclusion of countries on an internationally-recognized list of high risk jurisdictions, on subsequent cross-border payments. We find countries that have been added to a high risk greylist face up to a 10 percent decline in the number of cross border payments received from other jurisdictions, but no change in the number sent. We also find that a greylisted country is more likely to see a decline in payments from other countries with weak AML/CFT institutions. We find limited evidence that these effects manifest in cross border trade or other flows. Given that countries that are placed on these lists tend to be poorer on average, these impacts are likely to be more strongly felt in developing countries.
Falling Off the Map: The Impact of Formalizing (Some) Informal Settlements in Tanzania with Justin Sandefur and Andrew Zeitlin
(Centre for the Study of African Economies Working Paper)
When the Tanzanian government formalized over 200,000 informal land claims by granting leasehold titles to residents of unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam in 2004, a few neighborhoods in the initial plan were excluded due to missing satellite photos. We examine the impact of this low-cost, large-scale titling intervention a decade later in a regression discontinuity design using new survey data collected on either side of the arbitrary boundary created by the missing photos. We find significant, positive effects on housing investment, and indicative but not statistically robust increases in tenure security and reductions in land sales. There is no evidence that titles improved access to credit markets.