Essays in Development and Public Economics

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three chapters. The first chapter investigates the role of tax rates and tax enforcement in stimulating tax revenues in low-capacity settings. Using a randomized policy experiment assigning property owners of a large Congolese city to different property tax liabilities as well as to enforcement or placebo messages, I show that (1) the status quo tax rates are above the revenue-maximizing tax rates: reducing the property tax rate by approximately 34% would maximize government revenue by lowering tax delinquency; (2) enforcement attenuates the delinquency response to higher rates and the revenue-maximizing tax rate increases with enforcement; (3) tax rates and enforcement are complementary policy levels: independently adjusting them would increase revenue by 61% but jointly adjusting them would raise revenue by 77%. The second chapter studies the tradeoffs between local elites and state agents as tax collectors in a low-capacity state. Using a randomized policy experiment assigning neighborhoods of a large Congolese city to property tax collection by city chiefs or state agents, I find that (1) chief collection raised tax compliance by 3.2 percentage points, increasing revenue by 44%; (2) although chiefs collected more bribes, there is no evidence of mismanagement or backlash on other margins; (3) according to a hybrid treatment arm in which state agents consulted with chiefs before collection, chief collectors achieved higher compliance by using local information to more efficiently target households with high payment propensities, rather than by being more effective at persuading households to pay conditional on having visited them. The third chapter investigates the relationship between exposure to Christian missions and individuals' ties with in-groups (family, coethnics) and out-groups (non-family, non-coethnics). Using archival records of colonial Christian missions in the DRC and contemporary data from surveys, social network questionnaires, and lab-in-the-filed experiments, I show that historical exposure to Christian missions results in (1) less in-group bias due to more favorable attitudes towards out-group members; (2) more out-group members in individuals' social network; (3) more recommendations of out-group members for a job; (4) more universalist values. I address the potential bias introduced by the endogenous location of missions by showing that missions that were abandoned early do not have the same effects.