Replication Data for: Marketing Taxation? Experimental Evidence on Enforcement and Bargaining in Malawian Markets

Understanding how to increase government revenue via taxation is a core puzzle in state development. Taxation is critical for states to fund public goods, and may have positive spillover effects on citizen-state relations. We argue that tax compliance will be higher when governments employ community-level, rather than individual-level, interventions. To test whether it is more effective to focus such interventions on top-down enforcement or bottom-up quasi-voluntary compliance, we ran a multi-arm field experiment in 128 markets in Malawi. We find that the bottom-up intervention significantly increased tax compliance by 40%. The top-down intervention had a less robust effect on compliance, although not significantly different from that in the bottom-up group. The bottom-up intervention, but not the top-down, also increased trust in government, satisfaction with services, and political engagement. The results show that community-level tax interventions can increase compliance and that quasi-voluntary approaches can positively reshape citizen-state relations.