Seminário NOVAFRICA: Optimal Assignment of Bureaucrats: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Tax Collectors in the DRC

Na quarta-feira, 10 de novembro, às 14:30, Jonathan Weigel da London School of Economics,  apresentará o seu trabalho sobre a capacidade de um governo de um país em desenvolvimento de cobrar impostos, tendo como evidência a Républica Democrática do Congo.

Autor:
Jonathan Weigel da London School of Economics

Resumo:
The assignment of workers to tasks and teams is a key margin of firm productivity and a potential source of state effectiveness. This paper investigates whether a low-capacity state can increase its tax revenue through the optimal assignment of its tax collectors. We study the two-stage random assignment of property tax collectors (i) into teams and (ii) to neighbourhoods in a large Congolese city. The optimal assignment involves positive assortative matching on both dimensions: high (low) ability collectors should be paired together, and high (low) ability teams should be paired with high (low) payment propensity households. Positive assortative matching stems from complementarities in collector-to-collector and collector-to-household match types. We provide evidence that these complementarities reflect high-ability collectors exerting greater effort when matched with other high-ability collectors. Implementing the optimal assignment would increase tax compliance by an estimated 36% relative to the status quo (random) assignment. By contrast, the government would need to replace 62% of lowability collectors with high-ability ones or increase collectors’ performance wages by 69% to achieve a similar increase under the status quo assignment.

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