Studies

Monica Martinez-Bravo, Gerard Padro-i-Miquel, Nancy Qian, Yang Yao / China / 2010

From the abstract: "This paper studies the impact of an increase in local leader accountability within an authoritarian regime by examining the effect of the introduction of village level elections in rural China. We collect a unique nationwide survey on the history of electoral reforms in 217 rural Chinese villages (1980-2005) and exploit variation in the timing of the introduction of elections to establish the causal e

Abhijit Banerjee, Selvan Kumar, Rohini Pande, Felix Su / India / 2010

From the abstract: "Do informational de?cits on the part of voters sustain poor quality of governance in low income countries? We provide experimental evidence on the role of public disclosures on candidate quality and incumbent performance in enhancing electoral accountability

Tim Besley, Torsten Persson / Global / 2010

From the website: "It is widely recognized that fragile states are key symptoms of under-development in many parts of the world. Such states are incapable of delivering basic services to their citizens and political violence is commonplace...This paper puts forward a framework for analyzing fragile states and applies it to a variety development policies in different types of states."

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Daniel Keniston, Nina Singh / India / 2010

Four interventions regarding police reform were randomized over 162 police stations across 11 districts of Rajasthan state. The intervention focused on reducing corruption and improving efficiency. Two of the four interventions - training and a freeze on transferring police between stations - had an effect.

Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, Stuti Khemani / India / 2010

From the abstract: "This paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation through these committees: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. We find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools."

Pupil-Teacher Ratio, Teacher Management and Education Quality
Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Michael Kremer / 2010
Thomas Fujiwara / Brazil / 2010

From the abstract: "This paper studies the effects of an electronic voting technology that introduced visual aids in Brazilian elections and facilitated voting for the less educated. Estimates exploiting a regression discontinuity design embedded in its phase-in through time indicate that electronic voting reduced residual (error-ridden and uncounted) votes and generated the de facto enfranchisement of a large fraction (11%) of the electorate."

Why Nations Fail
Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson / Global / 2010

An exploration of democracy's links with development; forthcoming.

Leonard Wantchekon / Benin / 2009

From the abstract: "This paper provides experimental evidence on the e

Abhijit Banerjee, Donald Green, Jennifer Green, Rohini Pande / India / 2009

From the abstract: "We conducted field experiments in rural India to examine the responsiveness of voter preferences to priming about the relevance of ethnicity and politician quality for service delivery. We used vignette experiments to examine how voter preferences vary with information about politician quality. We nd strong evidence that ethnic preferences are malleable."