3

Using a sharp tax boundary in Makeni, Sierra Leone, we find preliminary evidence that state-building crowds out traditional authorities, but at a cost to government legitimacy.

Using a sharp tax-bill threshold in Freetown’s property tax reform, we test whether being taxed makes citizens demand more political accountability.

An experiment embedded in the tax bills of 77,912 Freetown property owners shows that messages about better services and fairer processes raise tax compliance among business owners, but not among other taxpayers.

In one of the first randomized evaluations of a get-out-the-vote campaign in sub-Saharan Africa, an SMS campaign run with Sierra Leone’s electoral commission had no effect on turnout.

With a local microfinance institution, we are developing a lower-cost, conditional credit product for Sierra Leone’s artisanal gold miners to improve incomes and labor conditions.

Abstract How do weak states collect taxes in the absence of enforcement capacity? One option is to collaborate with local non-state traditional political authorities. To study the impact of collaboration, I partnered with the local government in Kono District, Sierra Leone (the KDC), and embedded an experiment within their awareness campaign for a new rural property tax.

A participatory budgeting experiment in Sierra Leone durably raised perceptions of government legitimacy, but polarized tax compliance along partisan lines, yielding no average effect.

A cluster-randomised trial in 363 Sierra Leonean villages finds that a community-based One Health program improved animal health and attitudes towards disease reporting, but had no detectable effect on human health.