Tax Thy Neighbor: How Italian Mayors Increase Taxation in their Hometowns

Do local officials enforce taxes harder on the people they live among? Tax Thy Neighbor takes up that question in the case of Italian municipalities, where mayors have meaningful discretion over property tax rates and where birthplace records make it possible to identify mayors who govern their own hometowns. Using close mayoral elections as a source of identification and a four-year panel of municipal property tax rates, I trace what happens to local taxation when the mayor is socially embedded in the community taxed. The paper argues that the social-embeddedness story cuts against standard expectations of clientelist tax leniency, and explores what that implies for theories of local political accountability.