PDRI-DevLab is hosting a Spring 2024 Workshop Series featuring its staff and affiliates.

Topic: Who Bears the Property Tax Burden? Evidence of Ethnic Favoritism from Nigeria

Presenter: Scott Kim

Session Details: Ethnic favoritism has long been argued to explain the puzzling correlation between sub-Saharan Africa’s high ethnic diversity and poor economic performance. Previous work has documented that leaders tend to redistribute resources to coethnics, but less is known about the nature of ethnic favoritism’s role in taxation. Utilizing novel spatial ethnic data and a World Bank policy in Nigeria that incentivized states to enumerate their buildings for revenue generation purposes, I reassess the role of ethnic favoritism within the property tax context. Preliminary results show that state governors do push the tax burden to non-coethnics, but only in states with closely contested elections.

This session will be a workshop and participants are requested to read the paper beforehand.

For more information, reach out to pdri-devlab@sas.upenn.edu