Pablo Moisés Guzmán Lizardo

Pablo Moisés Guzmán Lizardo
PhD Student, Political Economics
PhD Program Office Graduate School of Business Stanford University 655 Knight Way Stanford, CA 94305

Pablo Moisés Guzmán Lizardo

I am a PhD Candidate in Political Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. My research interests are located in the intersection of public economics, development economics, and political economy. Particularly, I care about how weak States in lower-income countries can successfully build their capacity to raise revenues and provide public services. My work is based in Sierra Leone, where a historically weak State is currently undergoing a country-wide property tax reform to increase its fiscal capacity.

I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market.

Research Interests

  • Development Economics
  • Public Economics
  • Political Economics
  • Public Finance

Job Market Paper

We conduct a field experiment within a property tax reform in Sierra Leone to test two hypotheses on converting digital tax tools into compliance. First, rather than marginally boosting general perceptions of enforcement among taxpayers, governments must implement targeted tax enforcement itself. Second, enforcement can be complemented by leveraging local social structures that shape taxpayers’ behavior. We test these hypotheses through two interventions. The first is an enforcement program involving enforcement notices, court hearings chaired by traditional chiefs, and penalties implemented by the local government. The second is a public campaign where religious authorities motivated taxpayers to comply with the tax through direct door-to-door visits using normative appeals and references to religious scripture. Each treatment is allocated following a factorial experiment design and we exploit variation in geographic treatment saturation to evaluate spillovers. We find that enforcement action increases the compliance rate by 53.4 p.p. This is 16 times the average effect in the main literature on compliance. The visits by religious leaders increased compliance by 4.9 p.p. Both interventions cause spillovers from treated property owners towards their neighbors. Finally, survey data on over 6,000 property owners suggests substantive improvements in taxpayers perceived credibility of enforcement and peer compliance, willingness to comply with the tax, and legitimacy of compliance.

Work in Progress

Impact of Militarized Policing in Dominican Republic

I build a novel, granular, panel dataset tracking all crime incidents and all mixed, police-military patrolling in Dominican Republic during the period between January 1st, 2023, and June 30th, 2023. I use this data to estimate the effect of police-military patrolling on the incidence of crime. I find that mixed patrols lead to a slight decrease in the incidence of crime in a neighborhood the week after an intervention. I do not find evidence of spillover effects on near neighborhoods.

Does Information about Enforcement Lead to Compliance?

In collaboration with Wilson Prichard and Niccolò; Meriggi. Together with the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, we evaluate the effect of spreading journalistic pamphlets about government tax enforcement action on the likelihood of compliance. We implement a Saturation Experimental Design to evaluate both the direct effect of receiving the pamphlets and the indirect effects of being informed about the pamphlets.

Aligning Enforcement Officer Incentives

In collaboration with Wilson Prichard and Niccolò; Meriggi. Leveraging a property tax reform in Kenema, Sierra Leone, we evaluate different incentive structures to motive productivity and reduce corruption of tax enforcement officers.

Mapping Attitudes Towards Taxation in Sierra Leone

In collaboration with Wilson Prichard and Niccolò; Meriggi. Across several city-wide property tax interventions in Sierra Leone, we map the evolution of attitudes towards property taxation and fiscal capacity across time and across several cities.