Working papers:
Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
Corruption and slow public service delivery are common problems in low- and middle-income countries. Can better management information systems improve delivery speed? Does improving the delivery speed reduce corruption? In a large-scale experiment with the Bangladesh Civil Service, I send monthly scorecards measuring delays in service delivery to government officials and their supervisors. The scorecards increase on-time service delivery by 11% but do not reduce bribes. Instead, the scorecards increase bribes for high-performing bureaucrats. A model where bureaucrats' reputational concerns constrain bribes can explain the results. When positive performance feedback improves bureaucrats' reputations, the constraint is relaxed, and bribes increase.
Media coverage: VoxDev, JPAL Policy Breif
Revise and resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics
Social movements are associated with large societal changes, but evidence on their causal effects is limited. We study the effect of the MeToo movement on a high-stakes decision—reporting a sexual crime to the police. We construct a new dataset of sexual and non-sexual crimes reported in 30 OECD countries, covering 88% of the OECD population. We analyze the effect of the MeToo movement by employing a triple-difference strategy over time, across countries, and between crime types. The movement increased reporting of sexual crimes by 10% during its first six months. The effect is persistent and lasts at least 15 months. Because we find a strong effect on reporting before any major changes to laws or policy took place, we attribute the effect to a change in social norms or information. Using more detailed US data, we show that the movement also increased arrests for sexual crimes in the long run. In contrast to a common criticism of the movement, we do not find evidence for large differences in the effect across racial and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that social movements can rapidly change high-stakes personal decisions.
Media coverage: Vox, PBS, Straits Times, Dagens Nyheter (Swedish), Politiken (Danish)
Revise and resubmit, Journal of Public Economics
Under what circumstances does corruption cause inefficiencies, and when are bribes merely a transfer? I propose a modified monopoly price discrimination model that shows under what circumstances corruption leads to an inefficiently high administrative burden in firm-government interactions. The model highlights the importance of the information setting of the firm-government interaction. When the government official knows the firms' Willingness To Pay (WTP) to avoid administrative burden, the interaction will have a Pareto efficient level of administrative burden with perfect price (i.e. bribe) discrimination. Without information about the firms' WTP, the government official uses red tape to extract more bribes from firms with higher WTP, causing inefficiently high levels of administrative burden. To test the model’s prediction, I use data on 186,277 government-firm interactions from 18 years of the Enterprise Survey covering 158 countries. Consistent with the model's predictions I find that corruption leads to increased administrative burden when government officials have less information about the firm's WTP and that the effect is larger for firms with a low WTP. This has several policy implications for where to focus anti-corruption efforts and how to reduce administrative burden.
Disagreements over business deals, land boundaries, and loan non-repayments are common impediments to economic transactions. To resolve such disputes, people in low-income countries are often forced to choose between costly and slow formal courts, or informal Dispute Resolution Mechanisms (DRMs) that lack state-sanctioned enforcement powers. Can a decentralized judicial institution run by locally elected officials increase access to justice by combining the best aspects of formal and informal dispute resolution? Can such an institution decrease the burden on higher-level courts and increase investment and growth? We evaluate the effects of the government introducing Village Courts (VCs) in rural Bangladesh using a large-scale randomized controlled trial. The introduction of VCs more than doubled the share of disputes resolved in state-sanctioned courts, but the ubiquitous informal institution called shalish remains the most commonly used DRM. There is some substitution from shalish to VC, but the district court congestion, economic activities, and social dynamics remain unaffected. The elected leaders in charge of implementing VCs are also involved in settling shalish cases, and the potential of VCs is limited by the constraints on their time. Without further investment in state capacity, the VC cannot supplant the even more decentralized shalish system.
Public Sector Salaries and the Quality of Governance: Evidence from Frontline Bureaucrats in India, with Siddharth Eapen George
Bureaucrat salaries are the largest expenditure item for most governments. We examine the effects of an unconditional increase in bureaucrats' pay, by analyzing a policy change in Telangana, India, where one group of frontline bureaucrats experienced a 91% pay increase while another group of bureaucrats performing the same job did not. Using a difference-indifferences design, we show that, on average, higher salaries (i) had no impact on performance, (ii) did not affect dishonest or corrupt behavior, (iii) reduced quit rates by 2.4 percentage points (16%) after 2 years but did not affect selection as the average quality of bureaucrats in service remained the same. Higher salaries increased effort among bureaucrats who were unhappy about their pay, but decreased effort from top performers. Experts incorrectly predicted that higher salaries would improve both bureaucrat performance and selection.
Why Do Governments Make Promises They Cannot Keep? Evidence from India’s National Clean Air Programme, with Archana Dhinakar Bala and Sangita Vyas
What are the consequences of setting ambitious air pollution targets? This paper studies this question in the context of South Asia, where it is estimated that 1.3 million people die annually from exposure to air pollution. The Indian Government created the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) with an ambitious aim to reduce air pollution in 131 cities by 40% by 2026. If successful, NCAP would be one of the most important environmental policies in history. We evaluate the effect of NCAP using a difference-in-differences approach that compares NCAP cities to cities not covered by NCAP, and find a precisely estimated zero effect. Using a survey experiment, we show that residents of NCAP cities are more satisfied with the government’s actions when told about the ambitious targets, even after being told that the government’s policy had no effect. These public opinion benefits can explain why the government sets unrealistic targets that it then fails to meet.
Selected Works in Progress:
Dual misbeliefs and technology adoption: Evidence from air purifiers in Bangladesh, with Ashfaqul Chowdhury, Teevrat Garg, and Maulik Jagnani
Registered Report: Adoption, Use, and Effects of Air Purifiers in Households, accepted based on pre-results review, Journal of Development Economics
Air pollution levels are dangerously high across many cities in low- and middle-income countries. We provide air monitors and air purifiers to households in Dhaka, Bangladesh in a field experiment with more than a thousand households. We show that households underestimate the air pollution inside their homes and rarely use the purifiers even when we compensate them for the electricity consumed by the purifiers. We show that air monitors partially correct the biased beliefs about air pollution and substantially increase purifier usage. Despite this, monitors do not increase willingness to pay for air purifiers among those who have never used one. However, using an air purifier together with a monitor increases households' valuation of the purifier. This indicates that practical experience with purifiers coupled with informed awareness about indoor pollution levels are both crucial in encouraging air purifier adoption.
Media coverage: VoxDev
Leveraging Technology to Reduce the Harms of Air Pollution in Bangladesh (Registered Report), with Doreen Boyd, Ro’ee Levy, and Sumil Thakrar
Causes and Consequences of Internet Shutdowns, with Aarushi Kalra and Ro'ee Levy
What Determines the Pollution-Income Relationship? Abatement Technology, Pollution Technology, and Bounded Utility, with Dorothy Ting
The Effect of Disaster Relief on Climate Adaptation: Evidence from Floods in Pakistan, with Muhammad Bin Khalid
Other Publications:
Reproducibility in Management Science. Management Science (2024) by Miloš Fišar, Ben Greiner, Christoph Huber, Elena Katok, Ali I. Ozkes, and the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration. Note: Member of the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration