Join the PIPE Collaborative for a reserach presentation by Augustin Bergeron; (USC Econ). Lunch will be provided.

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How does delegating state responsibilities to informal local leaders impact those leaders' local legitimacy, integrity, and distribution of resources? We tackle this question by exploiting whether city chiefs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were randomly assigned to collect property taxes in 2018. To obtain objective measures of chief behavior, we study a government cash transfer program one year later in which chiefs had discretion over the recipients of development aid. We examine how delegating tax collection to chiefs impacts their (i) chosen distribution of aid benefits throughout the neighborhood, (ii) diversion of public resources, and (iii) perceived legitimacy among the residents in their jurisdiction. We find that chiefs who collected taxes allocated more program benefits to poorer households and thus made fewer inclusion and exclusion errors. They were no more or less likely to pocket benefits or allocate them to family. Citizens also updated positively about chiefs who collected taxes across various measures. We provide evidence that collector chiefs were more likely to target the poor because door-to-door tax collection created opportunities to learn which households were in greatest need.