This three-year, $714,600 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program aims to advance understanding of state formation in fragile post-conflict settings. The grantee, the National Bureau of Economic Research, will collaborate with local government and a non-governmental organization to experimentally evaluate a legal capacity building program implemented in a target city.
The program has two treatment arms - a "punitive" arm in which state lawyers serve as neighborhood legal representatives, and a "restorative" arm in which a neighborhood leader performs these functions. The project will empirically examine the program's effects on property rights security, crime, violence, and citizens' willingness to pay taxes. Findings seek to enhance knowledge of how strong states can emerge when tax collection capacity is initially low, by taking a legal rather than fiscal approach to building state capacity and resolving disputes effectively and fairly. The research may also provide insights into complementarities between formal and informal justice institutions.
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