On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Algorithms and Bureaucrats: Evidence from Tax Audit Selection in Senegal
Can algorithms enhance the work of bureaucrats in developing countries? Developing economies are often data-poor environments, where individual bureaucrats have substantial discretion to take key decisions, such as selecting taxpayers for audits. Exploiting a trove of newly digitized microdata, we conduct a field experiment across tax offices in Senegal, whereby half of the annual audit program is selected by inspectors and the other half is selected by a risk-scoring algorithm. We document three sets of results. First, inspector-selected audits are 18 ppt more likely to be conducted and detect higher amounts of evasion. Second, algorithm-selected audits are less cost-effective and do not generate less corruption. Third, even an ex-post optimized algorithm, trained on outcome data, would have increased detected evasion by only 5% compared to the inspector selection. This is consistent with the inspectors’ high skill level and the imperfection of the available data.
(with Pierre Bachas, Alipio Ferreira and Bassirou Sarr)
