Experimental Design
A recurring dilemma in public administration is whether frontline officials should be posted "at home" or rotated away from the communities where they are socially embedded. Posting officials locally can be attractive because it may reduce frictions in implementation: local officials are easier to place, they speak the local social "language", they often know where to find people and how to navigate the area, they may have private information about local dynamics or particular citizens' characteristics and they may have additional leverage over local citizens through their personal ties. Yet the relationships that make local implementation easier may also reshape incentives. When an official’s decisions directly impose costs or confer benefits on friends, relatives, and neighbors, the official may internalize these consequences -- creating pressure to bend rules, soften enforcement, or redirect effort, especially where monitoring is weak and discretion is high. Such internalization may result from intrinsic preferences of local administrators, or from the ability of citizens to exert pressure on the local administrator as a result of their local ties. Whether local embeddedness strengthens or weakens state capacity is therefore an empirical question that depends on both the task and the institutional environment.
We study this tradeoff in the context of tax collection in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In our context, tax collectors choose their enforcement effort and are paid based on performance. Local information may increase the productivity of effort by raising the probability that enforcement leads to payment. Social ties, however, can also create a countervailing motive: inducing payment imposes real costs on the collector's social network, reducing the collector's net incentive to push for compliance even when they have better information. Home postings may increase the capacity to collect (via information) while simultaneously reducing the willingness to enforce (because of internalized costs), making the overall effect on revenue and corruption ambiguous ex ante.
In this project, we compare tax collectors who are assigned to their "home zones" (where they live), "quasi-home zones" (where they frequent), or "past zones" (where they were assigned randomly as collectors last year) -- compared to neighborhoods where they have no personal ties. Does proximity to one's social network improve tax compliance through better information and targeting or stronger influence over taxpayers? Or does proximity undermine compliance because collectors internalize the burden imposed on citizens in their network and adjust enforcement accordingly? To examine these questions, we leverage variation generated by the assignment protocols used in 2025 and 2026 property tax campaigns conducted in the city of Kananga, DRC. Each year, collectors rotate across multiple collection zones over the course of the campaign. These assignments generate plausibly exogenous differences in whether a collector works in their home, quasi-home, or past zones in a given wave of the tax campaign. This structure allows us to estimate how home postings shape tax compliance, revenue, and bribe extraction, and administrator-citizen interactions in a low-capacity environment. We will also explore how dimensions of the tax collector and property owner relationship may affect tax compliance decisions by owners and tax enforcement by collectors, including age, co-ethnicity, co-partinsanship, and religious affiliation.