Municipal tenant eviction filing fee waivers are typically evaluated by their effect on eviction judgments, yet in Nairobi's low-income wards the more consequential outcome may be household doubling-up, the consolidation of two or more households into a single dwelling. The design treats the filing fee as a price of formal eviction and models doubling-up as a substitute adjustment that landlords and tenants use when the formal channel becomes cheaper or costlier. Because no ward-level panel of fee-waiver adoption and doubling-up currently exists, the paper specifies the data infrastructure the design requires, the identifying assumptions it must satisfy, and the threats to inference that arise from endogenous waiver adoption, eviction-case selection, and household mobility. The contribution is a falsifiable research design and a set of derived propositions linking fee thresholds to household consolidation, rather than an estimate. Fee-waiver evaluations which ignore doubling-up will overstate tenant welfare gains, because a waiver that lowers the cost of formal eviction may accelerate informal consolidation rather than prevent displacement.
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Nyakundi et al. (2026) studied this question.
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