2024

Tax Compliance and Accountable Governance: Experimental Evidence from Firms in Uganda

Researchers:
  • Stephan Dietrich
  • Yannick Markhof
  • Firminus Mugumya
  • Rose Camille Vincent
Location:
Kampala
Type:
  • Pilot project
A fiscal social contract in which citizens pay taxes and the government is accountable to taxpayer demands in the way funds are spent is a fundamental characteristic of many democratic states. However, many LMICs exhibit low tax compliance and dissatisfaction...

Humanitarian Aid and Its Consequences

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
How can humanitarian aid be most cost-effectively delivered? How does receiving humanitarian aid shape recipients’ beliefs about the government’s effectiveness and legitimacy, and by extension, their political participation? The research team proposes to study...

2023

Religious leadership and political engagement

Researchers:
Multidisciplinary Type I Proposal (exploratory research) The charismatic movement has reshaped Christianity over the last century, challenging the traditional dominance of hierarchical organizations like the Catholic Church and Traditional Protestant Missions...

Mental Health and Politics in Myanmar

Researchers:
Multidisciplinary Type II Proposal (additional research components added on to an ongoing or recently completed RCT) In Kayin, Myanmar, our team of social scientists and medical doctors is conducting a randomized control trial with Community Partners...

Fostering Peer Learning Among Local Elected Representatives

Researchers:
  • Apurva Bamezai
  • Siddharth George
  • Siddharth Hari
Type:
  • Full project
India’s success in broadening political representation – through decentralization and political reservations for disadvantaged groups – has brought in new leaders. However, many of these leaders may be unfamiliar with how government works and lack the networks...

2022

Candidate Entry into Local Government

Researchers:
Type:
  • Pilot project
This pilot considers the governance challenge of getting high human capital, high integrity, representative citizens to put themselves forward for consideration as political candidates. We plan to explore potential solutions to this challenge with our partners...

Decreasing polarization and instilling civic values at scale

Researchers:
  • Alberto Simpser
Type:
  • Pilot project
Support for democracy is dangerously low and decreasing in Latin America and many countries. At the same time polarization is high and on the rise. In this project we test whether a civic education program---developed by Democracy International and delivered...

2021

Social Media & COVID-19

Researchers:
  • Jeremy Bowles
  • John Marshall
  • Pia Raffler
Location:
Uganda
Type:
  • Full project
In developing contexts where the state’s reach and credibility are limited, social media could help connect citizens with government and shape pro-social behaviors by informing and encouraging citizen action. These phenomena are especially important during the...

The Power of Agency: Evidence from a Participatory Agricultural Transformation

Researchers:
  • Xavier Gine
  • Aprajit Mahajan
  • Anup Malani
  • Manaswini Rao
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
“Participatory” development emphasizes a “bottom-up” approach focusing on community control over planning and implementation decisions to improve development outcomes. We propose to assess the value of community participation in the location choice and...

Female Empowerment and Local Governance in Indonesia

Researchers:
  • Eitan Paul
Type:
  • Full project
Women’s interests remain underrepresented in local policymaking despite the implementation of community-based and participatory planning and budgeting programs in much of the developing world. Male dominance in neighborhood institutions may make it difficult...

2019

Using Social Media to Guard the Ballots: Evidence from a Facebook Campaign to Monitor Elections

Researchers:
  • Natalia Garbiras-Diaz
  • Mateo Montenegro
Location:
Colombia
Type:
  • Full project
Clientelism and other forms of electoral corruption remain an important challenge to democratic institutions in the developing world. Bottom-up monitoring technologies, which rely on civil society to oversee the provision of public goods and services, have...

Improving Labor Courts: Fighting Corruption with Competition

Researchers:
Location:
Mexico
Type:
  • Full project
Labor courts are essential for addressing grievances adequately and for well-functioning labor markets. Unfortunately, courts in developing countries function poorly. In Mexico, the law indicates that all lawsuits should be adjudicated within 3 months, but...

2018

Reducing Free-Riding in Public Goods: An Experimental Approach to Improving Payment Compliance for Trash Collection in the Dominican Republic

Researchers:
Location:
Dominican Republic
Type:
  • Pilot project
This is a collaborative project with the City government of Santo Domingo to design and evaluate different interventions to improve payment compliance for public garbage collection. In a first stage, we will analyze data on payment histories, as well as...

Performance Base Incentives in Multi-Layered Organizations: Evidence from Sierra Leonean Community Health Workers

Researchers:
  • Erika Deserranno
  • Philipp Kastrau
  • Gianmarco Leon
Location:
Sierra Leone
Type:
  • Full project
Pay-for-performance (P4P) has shown to be effective in improving job performance in both private and public organizations. Existing literature has studied the effect of P4P within a single tier of the organizational hierarchy, mostly focusing on frontline...

Building State Capacity and National Unity with Market Design: The Problem of Volunteer Assignment in Kenya's G-United Program

Researchers:
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Pilot project
This project capitalizes on an opportunity to redesign a centralized labor market match to address two questions related to improving personnel management in bureaucracies and improving national unity. The program, G-United, places Kenyan university graduates...

Improving State Response to Public Grievances

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Pilot project
The Delhi Government’s Public Grievance Monitoring System (PGMS) seeks to redress citizen complaints about public goods and services. Currently, the redressal process is slow, resolutions are of poor quality, and citizen satisfaction is low. We seek to pilot...

Performance Scorecards and Government Service Delivery

Researchers:
  • Martin Mattsson
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Full project
Corruption and delays in government service delivery are positively correlated at the cross-country level, but it is not known if the relationship is causal in either direction. We propose a model of how the ability of bureaucrats to cause delays increases the...

Peer Effects and Conformity in Bureaucratic Inefficiency

Researchers:
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Pilot project
We propose studying the role of conformity and peer effects in corrupt behavior among bureaucrats of a large public service provider in Kenya. Peer pressure has been shown to have the potential to increase productivity and may have the potential to discipline...

Greener on the Other Side? Tax Collection and Horizontal Inequity

Researchers:
  • Michael Best
  • François Gerard
  • Evan Kresch
  • Joana Naritomi
  • Laura Zoratto
Location:
Brazil
Type:
  • Full project
This project works with the government of the city of Manaus, Brazil to improve compliance with the municipal property tax. Specifically, we aim to understand the role that horizontal inequity -- similar households being treated differently by tax policy --...

2017

Evaluating the Effect of Broadcasting Legislative Debates: Evidence from Liberia

Researchers:
  • Jeremy Bowles
  • Horacio Larreguy
Location:
Liberia
Type:
  • Full project
In the context of Liberia, one of the world’s poorest democracies where democratic accountability is weakest, USAID and Internews Liberia ambitiously ran standardized debates between legislative candidates in all 73 electoral districts, designed to solicit...

Donating Time for Democracy: Encouraging Prosocial Behavior through Civic Education, Commitment Devices, and Group Communication

Researchers:
  • Andrei Gomberg
  • Ulrike Malmendier
  • Alberto Simpser
Location:
Mexico
Type:
  • Pilot project
Many civic institutions like democracy require a substantial degree of citizen engagement and prosocial behavior. In Mexican elections, citizens staff polling booths and count votes, providing a privately-costly public good. However, it is becoming harder to...

Politician Entry, Selection, and Performance in Sierra Leone

Location:
Sierra Leone
Type:
  • Full project
This project explores the relationship between regional party strongholds, where competition in the general election is weak and generates little accountability pressure, and the poor performance of elected officials. In such areas, the competition of import...

How Income Growth Shapes the State: A Village-Level Randomized Controlled Trial on Unconditional Cash Transfers, Community Engagement, and Local Politician Responses in Kenya

Researchers:
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Pilot project
Unconditional cash transfers to poor households are one of the most important innovations in poverty reduction in the last quarter-century. We build on two studies which randomly allocate the rollout of an unconditional cash transfer program, run by...

The Elasticity of Tax Compliance: Evidence from a Low-Capacity State

Researchers:
Location:
Democratic Republic of Congo
Type:
  • Full project
Compliance is a key challenge for low-capacity states seeking to expand their tax base. A first order question that remains largely unanswered in the developing world context is: What is the elasticity of tax compliance with respect to the marginal tax rate...

Designing Performance Indicators for Career Incentives

Researchers:
Location:
China
Type:
  • Full project
We consider a case of career incentives given to local civil servants hired by the Chinese Government to serve the broad needs of the population. In collaboration with the regional officials and a provincial research center focusing on local governance, we...

Mobilizing Local Leaders to Rebuild the Social Compact

Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Full project
A significant challenge to the provision of local public services–water, sanitation, waste removal, etc.–in developing economies is the inability to raise adequate resources, especially through local taxation. In many countries, the social compact, whereby...

Teacher Rotation and Student Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

Researchers:
  • Ernesto Dal Bo
  • Isabelle Cohen
  • Kizito Omala
  • David Schonholzer
Location:
Uganda
Type:
  • Full project
One of the biggest challenges in supplying education services to poor populations is low personnel morale, low engagement, and high absenteeism. This problem is particularly severe in Uganda, where teacher absenteeism rates are estimated at 27%. However...

Institutional Reform and De Facto Women's Rights in Punjab, Pakistan

Researchers:
Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Pilot project
Women’s rights to make life choices such as whether and when to marry and divorce are intrinsically important. Yet in many contexts, the law on the books is substantially more progressive than the de facto practice of the law. Pakistan is a good example: the...

Demand-Driven Enforcement of Labor Law in Bangladesh

Researchers:
  • Laura Boudreau
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Full project
Weak states with poor institutions often lack the capacity to implement and/or to enforce labor regulations aimed at improving working conditions. Increasingly, private actors are enforcing labor standards in these countries, but the effects of their...

Community Engagement and Lottery Efficiency: Learning from Nepal

Researchers:
  • Abraham Holland
Location:
Nepal
Type:
  • Pilot project
What is the role of community preferences in driving the viability of village relocation programs following natural disasters? Nepal’s post-2015 earthquake village resettlement program, an effort to shift high-risk communities to safer, previously unsettled...

Improving Labor Courts: The Effects of Publicly Provided Lawyers and Statistical Information

Researchers:
Location:
Mexico
Type:
  • Full project
Labor courts are essential for well-functioning labor markets and the provision of justice. In Mexico, labor courts are characterized by long delays in trials, low settlement rates, misinformation and overconfidence among plaintiffs, and lawsuit inflation. We...

2016

Place Based Interventions at Scale: The Direct and Spillover Effects of Policing and City Services on Crime

Researchers:
Location:
Colombia
Type:
  • Full project
Bogota’s Mayor and police have ambitious plans to extend state order to the corners of the city where they do not hold a monopoly of violence. They aim not only to reduce crime and violence, but also to increase state legitimacy and civilian support. The...

Government Mobile Salary Payments in Afghanistan

Researchers:
Location:
Afghanistan
Type:
  • Full project
Governments must pay their employees for states to function. Frequent delays and leakage of salary payments can undermine government effectiveness. These problems are severe in Afghanistan. Mobile Salary Payments (MSPs)—a system enabling employees to receive...

Can Smart Technology Systems Improve Direct Benefit Transfer Performance and Increase Participation? Evidence from MGNREGA in India

Researchers:
  • Eric Dodge
  • Yusuf Neggers
  • Charity Troyer-Moore
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
The implementation of social protection programs remains a challenge in developing countries, often to the particular detriment of the most vulnerable intended beneficiaries. We will investigate the potential of a new internet- and mobile-based management and...

Citizen Demand for Corruption: Evidence from Roadway Tolls in the D.R. Congo

Researchers:
  • Otis Reid
  • Jonathan Weigel
Location:
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Type:
  • Full project
This study examines the determinants of petty corruption in the DRC. In pilot data, 42 percent of motorcycle taxi drivers reported paying less than the official rate at tolls. To explain this high rate of non-compliance, we randomly offer motorcycle taxi...

Participatory Development and Social Preferences: Experimental Evidence from Bangaldesh

Researchers:
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Full project
Since the 1990s, Community Driven Development (CDD) has become an increasingly common approach for development assistance. This has led the academic literature to assess the extent to which CDD programs can affect social norms and behaviors in benefiting...

Two Approaches to Community Development

Researchers:
Location:
Sierra Leone
Type:
  • Full project
Decades of unaccountable leadership, conflict and underdevelopment have limited the reach of the state into rural Sierra Leone and left communities with a dearth of public services. This project explores two distinct mechanisms to bridge the gap between...

Plugging the Leaky Bucket: Generating Experimental Evidence to Support Indonesia's Social Protection Reforms

Researchers:
Location:
Indonesia
Type:
  • Full project
The Government of Indonesia (GoI) is embarking on a radical shift in Raskin, Indonesia’s largest targeted social assistance program, moving from in-kind transfers run by the government to a novel delivery system: restricted electronic vouchers that can be...

Age, Organization, and Accountability: Evidence from the DRC

Researchers:
  • Sara Lowes
  • Eduardo Montero
  • Nathan Nunn
  • James Robinson
Location:
Democratic Republic of Congo
Type:
  • Full project
This project explores the extent to which age sets, a traditional social structure in many African societies, can be exploited to improve local oversight, governance, and the provision of public goods. Age sets are initiation rituals that create cohesive...

2015

Career Concerns and Pro-Sociality in Political Selection: Evidence from Village Elections in Pakistan

Researchers:
  • Saad Gulzar
  • Yasir Khan
Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Full project
What motivates people to seek political office? We design and evaluate an experiment to study how non-elite prospective politicians can be motivated to seek political office by priming them on career or pro-social motivation from entering politics, reducing...

Encouraging Voters to Pay Attention to Candidate Qualifications

Researchers:
  • Siddharth George
  • Yusuf Neggers
  • Sarika Ringwala
Location:
India
Type:
  • Pilot project
This project features an evaluation of a local NGO's large-scale SMS-based information sharing effort in the week prior to the November 2015 state legislative assembly elections in the state of Bihar. The study contained multiple treatment arms, including: (i)...

Citizen Empowerment and Social Pensions in Delhi

Researchers:
  • Sarika Ringwala
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
Ensuring the well-being of particularly vulnerable groups in society remains an important priority and challenge for all governments, especially in developing countries. Oftentimes, even when welfare schemes are available, they are not taken up by those who...

Lighting Up Bihar: Electrification to Sustain Economic Growth

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
Power supply, in many developing countries, is stuck in a cycle of non-payment and unreliable service. Customers do not pay because supply is poor, and the state-run utilities do not upgrade supply because, even if some customers did pay in full, the utility...

When Do Media Stations Support Electoral Accountability?

Researchers:
  • Horacio Larreguy
  • Christopher Lucas
  • John Marshall
Location:
Mexico
Type:
  • Full project
The importance of an informed electorate for electoral accountability is widely recognized. However, while a large literature has focused on voter access to media news sources, little is known empirically about the incentives for media stations to provide...

A Market-Equilibrium Approach to Vote-Buying

Researchers:
Location:
Uganda
Type:
  • Full project
Vote-buying remains a major impediment to democracy in low-income countries. We propose to evaluate a campaign against vote-buying targeting both the supply and the demand side of the market for votes, ahead of the 2016 election in Uganda. Our experiment will...

Can Devolving the Police Increase the State's Capacity to Provide Legal Protection?

Researchers:
  • Jasper Cooper
Location:
Papua New Guinea
Type:
  • Full project
How should policing powers be structured to maximize the state's capacity to deliver legal protections to its citizens? When the state's reach is limited, those few interactions citizens have with police are often marked by corruption, absenteeism and abuse...

(De)centralized Pricing for Public Services: Evidence from Tanzania

Researchers:
  • Florian Blum
Location:
Tanzania
Type:
  • Full project
When private providers of publicly subsidized services have superior information about production and demand conditions, effective service delivery requires redistributing rents to providers. Yet, allocating excessive resources to providers reduces the surplus...

When Do Media Stations Support Electoral Accountability? A Field Experiment in Mexico

Researchers:
  • Horacio Larreguy
  • John Marshall
Location:
Mexico
Type:
  • Full project
  • Pilot project
The importance of an informed electorate for electoral accountability is widely recognized. However, while a large literature has focused on voter access to media news sources, little is known empirically about the incentives for media stations to provide...

2014

Vote-buying and anti-reciprocity: A pilot study in Bangladesh

Researchers:
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Pilot project
Vote-buying is a significant challenge to the functioning of many democracies, yet the impact of vote payments on voters’ decision-making process and behavior remains poorly understood. The objective of this project is to pilot in ten communities in rural...

Monitoring Public Employees in Paraguay: Can Technology Adoption by the Government Improve Agricultural Extension Services for Poor Farmers?

Researchers:
Location:
Paraguay
Type:
  • Full project
A key question in governmental organizations, where pay‐for‐performance is often impractical, is whether the adoption of new monitoring technologies can induce higher employee effort and more successful public service delivery. In addition, all organizations...

Improving the Impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme by Identifying Corruption and Reducing Leakages in its Electronic Payment Scheme

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
Electronic payment technologies are currently being heralded as a panacea to corruption in public programs since, in theory, when cash benefits are transferred directly to beneficiaries, opportunities for leakage can be dramatically reduced. But while new...

Nudging Good Politicians

Researchers:
  • Nico Ravanilla
Location:
Philippines
Type:
  • Pilot project
This study evaluates a policy intervention that screens-in and selectively incentivizes good politicians. Using a randomized controlled trial (RCT), I show that a leadership training workshop in which aspiring candidates are given incentives conditional on...

Voting Outcomes in Bihar

Researchers:
  • Yusuf Neggers
Location:
India
Type:
  • Pilot project
While advances in monitoring and voting technologies have been shown to improve the functioning of elections, the potential importance of the remaining interactions between government officials and voters on election day is not as well understood. Leveraging...

What messages encourage young South Africans to register to vote?

Researchers:
  • Adam Berinsky
  • Daniel de Kadt
  • Kate Orkin
  • Dan Posner
Location:
South Africa
Type:
  • Pilot project
Widespread electoral participation is a foundational element of a healthy democracy and an important mechanism for voters to exercise policy making and public spending oversight. Existing work attributes low voter turnout in developing countries to poor voter...

Motivating Bureaucrats: Autonomy vs. Performance Pay for Public Procurement in Pakistan

Researchers:
Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Full project
This project works directly with the government of Punjab, Pakistan to improve the effectiveness of public procurement. We develop two novel methods to measure procurement effectiveness and leakages based on detailed, item-level characteristics data and random...

Diminishing the Effect of Vote-Buying on Electoral Outcomes in India

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
Vote-buying is a widespread practice in developing countries that may undermine the accountability and responsiveness of elected officials, especially to the needs of the poor. One way to reduce the incidence of vote-buying is by diminishing its effectiveness...

Participation and Regulatory Compliance in Vietnam

Researchers:
  • Edmund Malesky
  • Markus Taussig
Location:
Vietnam
Type:
  • Full project
Our project will assess Vietnam’s current process for participation by firms in the drafting of new business regulations, testing whether this participation can improve labor rights and safety. We will use an RCT to analyze downstream compliance with a...

Engendering Compliance: Evaluating and Improving a Randomized Tax Holiday Policy

Researchers:
  • Thad Dunning
  • Felipe Monestier
  • Rafael Pineiro
  • Fernando Rosenblatt
  • Guadalupe Tuñón
Location:
Uruguay
Type:
  • Full project
We study a unique randomized policy innovation in Montevideo, Uruguay, in which the municipal government raffles tax holidays to eligible taxpayers. Using access to over-time tax payment records and our own survey data, we will assess the impact of holidays on...

2013

Informing and Mobilizing Voters by Texting: Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment in Kenya

Researchers:
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Full project
This project explores the role of voter’s information in a new institutional context. The setting of the 2013 Kenyan elections differed from the widely contested 2007 elections on several dimensions, including a new electoral commission and a new set of six...

Reconciliation, Development, and Institutional Change

Researchers:
Location:
Sierra Leone
Type:
  • Full project
Can post-conflict reconciliation generate social cohesion and economic development within societies emerging out of civil war? Researchers conduct a randomized controlled trial of a community-based reconciliation intervention in Sierra Leone, which facilitates...

2012

Changing Beliefs, Changing Bribes

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
  • Pilot project
This project has been canceled. Researchers will investigate the effect of changing legal penalties, and citizens' beliefs about these penalties, on corruption. They will focus on a single, clear case: the law against riding a motorcycle without a helmet in...

Understanding Ethnic Cooperation: Evidence from Experiments in Kenya

Researchers:
  • Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge
  • Kjetil Bjorvatn
  • Simon Galle
  • Daniel Posner
  • Bertil Tungodden
  • Kelly Zhang
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Pilot project
Ethnic polarization is often linked to underdevelopment and poor governance. What amplifies and what mitigates ethnic tensions amongst individuals in a society? The proposed piloting and project expansion aims to understand how subtle and moderate changes in...

Recruiting and Motivating Community Health Workers: A National Field Experiment in Zambia

Researchers:
Location:
Zambia
Type:
  • Full project
In collaboration with the government of Zambia, researchers are designing and evaluating alternative strategies to recruit, motivate, and retain a new cadre of civil servants: community health assistants (CHAs). CHAs will be recruited from their home...

Trust in State Authority and Non-State Actors

Researchers:
Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Full project
  • Pilot project
The ability of the state to maintain trust with its citizens is a challenge in emerging economies. The proposed study examines how perceptions of relative state effectiveness determine a citizen's engagement with state and non-state actors. It does so by...

Governance for the Management of Local Public Goods

Researchers:
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Full project
In this project, conducted jointly with IPA’s Safe Water Program (SWP), researchers seek to shed light on two issues: the impact of public versus secret voting for local positions in a context of ethnic diversity, and the impact of involving government...

2011

The Impact of Information on Voter Knowledge and Engagement: Evidence from the 2012 Elections in Sierra Leone

Location:
Sierra Leone
Type:
  • Full project
  • Pilot project
This randomized evaluation explores innovative strategies that leverage information to enhance political accountability in the presence of strong ethnic and regional ties to parties in Sierra Leone. The accountability function of voting is compromised when...

Increasing the Transparency of Environmental Regulation

Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
This project will assess the effectiveness of disseminated information in improving the enforcement of environmental regulation in India. The evaluation, conducted jointly with the environmental regulator in an Indian state, will test two interventions. First...

Enforcing Anti-Corruption Laws on Traffic Law Violators

Researchers:
Location:
Hyderabad, India
Type:
  • Pilot project
This project has been canceled. In the aggregate, even small routine bribes can be very harmful. Petty bribes reduce the expected cost of punishment faced by individuals, diluting the deterrence effect of laws, while also providing a gateway to more serious...

Establishing Responsive Linkages between Politicians and Voters

Researchers:
Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Full project
We partner with provincial legislators in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan to test whether integrated voice response (IVR) technology can springboard communication between politicians and voters and thereby improve accountability, responsiveness, and development...

The Social Network of Firms: Can Social Incentives and Taxpayer Recognition Improve Tax Compliance?

Researchers:
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Full project
Improving tax revenue collection is an important priority for developing economies throughout the world. Traditional methods for improving compliance have generally relied on a punishment-based method: audits, coupled with penalties, for non-compliant...

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