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. APSR Data Editors' Note: APSR Data Editors have reviewed included documentation for completeness and have successfully reproduced all figures and tables in the article using the code and data included in this deposit. Data editors do not review results presented in appendices or supplementary materials.