The competence of public officials affects state performance and economic growth, yet building this capacity is difficult: it requires protocols to identify more capable, representative individuals; their willingness to run for office; and party interest in supporting their candidacies. We evaluate an experiment designed to parse these problems of identification, entry and gatekeeping in advance of the 2023 local elections in Sierra Leone. A combination of community nominations and technocratic screening identifies individuals who are substantially higher quality and enjoy broader popular support than both incumbents and status quo aspirants. One quarter of top nominees formally enter politics, positively self-selected on quality, and their entry improves the maximum quality observed in candidate applicant pools. Party gatekeepers, however, are not more likely to select these capable, popular nominees and instead favor their own re-running incumbents. Results suggest that the challenge for political renewal is less about supply than demand in this context: there are indeed better potential candidates out there who are willing to run, but institutional party incentives work against selecting them.

We present initial results from a randomized evaluation that varies the degree of decentralization within Zambia's Constituency Development Fund, which has expanded twenty-fold since 2021. In partnership with the government, we randomly assigned districts to a reform with two components: reducing central government influence over local community project selections, and expanding districts' discretion to use light-touch procurement processes. District officials internalized both reforms, obtaining project approvals substantially faster and shifting hundreds of tenders into simpler procurement processes. Increased discretion modestly improves the sectoral alignment of selected projects with local demand while, at a minimum, not exacerbating existing biases in the spatial allocation of resources. Reduced bidding on tenders appears to reflect a reduction in non-competitive bids rather than a consequential reduction in competition. Early results also suggest this can speed up project completion without negative effects on quality.

This paper investigates the relative merit of traditional leaders in promoting cooperative behavior when informally taxing citizens' labor in low-income states and whether this comes at the expense of relatively poor households. I designed a field experiment to measure whether citizens distort their behavior when facing informal taxation schemes by engaging in costly actions to avoid contributing their labor to a public good. I randomize communities into different methods to select contributors and compare the status quo of selection by chiefs versus two alternatives: random lotteries and progressive selection based on household surveys. Results show that chiefs' informal taxes distort individual behavior slightly less than the alternative mechanisms, revealing that chiefs can indeed promote pro-social behavior but not in a magnitude suggesting large efficiency gains. However, chief selection leads to less overall participant effort during the experiment, suggesting that chiefs' involvement does alter people's incentives during income-generating tasks. When focusing on differences by wealth, I also find chiefs do generate distortions among this group, which are more likely to accept lower wages to avoid being informally taxed by chiefs. On the other hand, progressive selection is slightly more distortionary than chief selection in terms of people avoiding informal taxes through costly actions, shifting costs toward people with intermediate levels of wealth.

Can structured cross socioeconomic status (SES) collaboration in elite universities build economic connectedness? We study this question in a field experiment embedded in a required undergraduate course at Universidad de los Andes during a period of rapidly rising low-SES enrollment. We map within-section friendship networks and elicit students' willingness to trade off working with a friend for working with a higher-performing non-friend, using randomized monetary incentives and randomized SES information about the potential teammate. We then randomly assign students to essay teams that vary in SES composition and instrumentally pair them with a random friend to work with. Baseline networks display strong SES homophily. Making SES salient increases high-SES students' preference to work only with friends, while low-SES students' choices become more homophilous at the top of the performance distribution. In realized teams, SES diversity reduces meeting and satisfaction and lowers willingness to work together again, with little effect on essay grades. These frictions persist in a follow-up survey, while friend-pairing mainly benefits low-SES students.

The high failure rate of new businesses in Colombia suggests a high entry rate among entrepreneurs with only low success potential. We test whether this is driven by incorrectly estimated success likelihoods — the relative roles of ambiguity preferences, confidence, and optimism — and whether these biases vary with true underlying potential. We recruit current, past, and aspiring Colombian entrepreneurs for an online experiment that simulates the decision to become an entrepreneur: participants choose between playing an entrepreneurship-related game for stakes or taking a certain payment, with randomized variation in the information available. Entry is high at baseline — over 80% choose to play — well above what risk preferences can account for. Information about individual, skill-based success likelihoods discourages some lower-potential participants, suggesting overconfidence, while information about the role of luck provides evidence against high optimism or risk-seeking. Overconfidence among lower-potential individuals generates over-entry, but the resulting high failure rate does not deter high-potential individuals' entry.