Devis Decet

This paper investigates how the spatial organization of a tax authority shapes fiscal capacity. I focus on the trade-offs between staffing many local offices and consolidating into a structure with tax agents and decision-making power concentrated in fewer, larger offices. Leveraging a reform of the Brazilian tax authority and disaggregated data on tax collection and local office organization, I find that consolidation increased tax revenues by 3.3%. The increase was largest where the reform allowed for more efficient utilization of enforcement and managerial resources. However, the reform led to a divergence in tax revenues within consolidated regions, particularly in peripheral areas farther from their new office and with weaker third-party reporting. My findings suggest that consolidation can lead to efficiency gains but also to larger geographic inequality in tax enforcement.

We study the relationship between access to water resources and local violence in Africa. Due to limited irrigation, rural communities rely on rainfall, rivers, and lakes for their economic needs. Rainfall scarcity can make access to water from rivers and lakes more valuable, thereby generating conflicts in rural settings. We explore this hypothesis by integrating granular data on the river network with high-resolution data on rainfall and violent conflict events in Africa from 1997 to 2021. We find that reduced rainfall in a location leads to more conflict in neighboring areas that are water-rich and located upstream along the river network. These are the sites that exert more control over the river flow. The effect is more pronounced in regions experiencing a long-term decline in water presence. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, conflicts concentrate in areas with higher returns to water access, as proxied by the presence of agricultural production. Additionally, the impact is more pronounced in regions with unequal water distribution among ethnic groups, highlighting how cooperation costs are an important friction preventing peaceful sharing of water resources. In terms of policy responses, we find that the effects tend to be mitigated in countries with stronger democratic institutions, better rule of law, higher state capacity and less corruption.

In contexts where child labour is pervasive, household decisions about allocating children's time between school and work involve a trade-off: current returns from child labour versus future returns from education. This paper tests for the existence of a third factor: future returns from child labour, as parents view farm work as an investment in agricultural skills. We provide evidence on each component of this trade-off in the context of rural Ghana by leveraging four waves of survey data on 5,000 households, exogenous shocks to agricultural productivity, and a vignette survey design to elicit parental beliefs.