Publications
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with Leah Rosenzweig
Journal of Experimental Political Science [Open Access]
What motivates property owners to pay taxes in places where state enforcement is weak? Using an online experiment among property owners in Lagos, Nigeria, we evaluate the effectiveness of different appeals at increasing respondents’ tax morale, or willingness to pay taxes absent enforcement, and attitudes about government enforcement of tax collection. Respondents were randomly assigned to read either a vignette emphasizing the role of property tax revenues in contributing to economic growth and increased property values or one highlighting that tax revenues are used for public goods and services benefiting all residents. The growth and property values message made respondents significantly more favorable toward enforcement of tax collection, but there was no difference in willingness to pay between the two conditions.
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with Michael Hankinson, Asya Magazinnik, and Melissa Sands
Urban Affairs Review (2023) [pdf][Online Appendix]
Scholars across disciplines frequently employ data on housing developments subsidized by the National Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). We find that the geographic coordinates for these developments, generated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are frequently inaccurate. Using both the population of data from California and a national sample, we find that HUD-provided geocodes are inaccurate nearly half the time while Google-generated geocodes are almost always more accurate. However, while Google’s geolocation is more likely to be accurate, when it is inaccurate, it deviates from the true location by a much greater distance than HUD. We therefore recommend that scholars use Google-generated geocodes for most research applications where the localized environment matters; however, in studies where observations are aggregated to a larger area, researchers may prefer to use HUD geocodes, which are more frequently inaccurate but typically by smaller distances.
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with Leah Rosenzweig
Studies in Comparative International Development (2023) [Open Access]
Governments often have contentious relationships with residents of urban informal settlements. Motivated by the desire for rents and dreams of becoming the next luxury destination, city governments worldwide have forcefully evicted and demolished informal communities in this pursuit. In such instances it would seem that the state has broken the social contract with its most vulnerable citizens. How do citizens respond? We might expect them to reciprocate in kind, by withholding taxes owed to the government. Using a survey of citizens living in informal settlements across Lagos State in Nigeria, we explore what predicts citizens’ willingness to comply with government taxation. In this unlikely context for voluntary compliance, we observe that a third of respondents pay taxes and a majority are willing to pay absent enforcement. We find minimal support for standard theories of tax payment — trust in or reciprocity toward the government, or identification with the nation. Instead, we find that willingness to pay taxes is correlated with group membership, believing that community members respect taxpayers, and donating to the community. Our data suggest that local institutions and social relations are associated with citizens’ willingness to comply with tax policy.
Working Papers
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When the state fails to provide basic services to citizens, it risks violating the fiscal contract, eroding quasi-voluntary compliance and undermining its ability to collect revenue via taxation. Existing research finds that when citizens exit public service delivery and opt for private alternatives, they are less willing to pay taxes. However, I argue that when citizens collectively exit, becoming member to joint agreements with private service providers, they are, in fact, more likely to be tax-compliant. I explain how this is due to the presence of a new intermediary who can extend the state's capacity. Using fine-grained administrative data and an original survey, I study this in the context of private housing estates in Lagos, Nigeria, which exemplifies the middle-class trend toward privatization across cities in the Global South. I find that residents of private estates are more likely to pay their property tax than similar residents who do not live in estates. Further, this is driven by estates where property managers track payments and provide information about residents to the government. These findings have implications for understanding the nature of the fiscal contract in the face of privatization and the political role of the urban middle class more broadly.
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with Chloe Wittenberg and Adam Berinsky
When politicians are accused of wrongdoing, how should they respond? Although popular media accounts stress the importance of apologies in repairing politicians’ images after a scandal, previous studies find inconsistent evidence for the efficacy of such apologies. We reconcile these competing results here. First, we advance a theory focused on the interaction between politicians’ post-scandal communications and the believability of the allegations. We then test this theory across a diverse set of scandals. Using three vignette experiments (n = 7,972, total observations = 23,645), we demonstrate that the public generally prefers apologies to other responses (e.g., denials, defenses), but these apologies have limited benefits when it comes to restoring political support. Nevertheless, consistent with our theory, apologies confer larger reputational advantages when the allegations are supported by strong versus weak evidence. Collectively, these results add nuance to previous conclusions regarding the relative efficacy of different responses to political scandals.
Works-in-Progress
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How does private substitution of government service delivery shape willingness to pay taxes? Although homeowner associations (HOAs) and other privatelygoverned communities are often villainized in both popular media and academic literature, we have little empirical evidence on their political implications. I test this using a vignette experiment on a broadly representative sample of the U.S. population. I find that people associate HOA membership with decreased willingness to pay municipal taxes and support for tax decreases, but this does not translate into decreased support for redistribution.
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with Stuart Russell
Data Collection was not completed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is a rich literature in political science on how information interventions affect voting behavior in developing contexts. However, in many cases, voters fail to vote out poorly-performing incumbent politicians, even after receiving credible and salient information about their performance in office (Dunning et al., 2019). We expect that these null effects are – at least in part – a function of cognitive biases that voters exhibit when processing information about politician performance. More specifically, we expect that voters engage in directionally motivated reasoning, responding to new information in such a way that allows them to maintain their existing beliefs. While much of the literature on motivated reasoning focuses on group and identity-based concerns, we expect that personal relationships with (and benefits received from) local politicians can similarly prompt motivated reasoning and create beliefs resistant to change.