Essays in Development and Public Economics

Abstract

This dissertation explores three developing world public economics questions. In chapter 1, I examine the tax behavior of small firms in Rwanda. Using administrative and survey data, combined with a field experiment, I provide evidence that how these firms respond to tax instruments diverges from traditional models of compliance in ways that have unintended and regressive consequences. The second chapter investigates the effectiveness of decentralizing tax collection in the context of a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I show that local collection outperforms centralized collection and assess the mechanisms behind this difference. In the final chapter, I examine how political alignment across levels of government in Chile affects the distribution of government resources and spending on public goods, finding that alignment in affiliation between central and local governments decreases transfers and spending on education.