Scott Kim, Business Economics and Public Policy, The Wharton School
Abstract: Inter-ethnic tensions have been well documented as one of the main inhibiting factors behind the slow economic progress of developing countries. For example, government leaders have shown to prioritize their ethnic supporter base in providing public goods and services (Franck and Rainer 2012; Kramon and Posner 2016), often resulting in suboptimal distributions. However, relatively little is known about the role of ethnicity in taxation. Specifically, how ethnicity influences the distribution of tax burden and what the costs of such ethnic targeting are, if existent, remain largely unknown. My proposed project will study the role of ethnic targeting in the building of the property tax system in Nigeria.