Source Themes

Informal Taxation in Development Projects: the Role of Chiefs in Sierra Leone (Job Market Paper)

This paper investigates the relative efficiency of traditional leaders when informally taxing citizens in low-income states and whether this comes at the expense of relatively poor households. I design a field experiment to measure whether citizens …

Candidate Entry Into Local Government

We explore the governance challenge of how to get high human capital, high integrity, representative citizens to put themselves forward for consideration as political candidates. To do so, we evaluate an intervention that was designed to tackle this …

Improving the Effectiveness of Zambia's Constituency Development Fund (Designing Intervention)

Faced with an undersupply of critical public infrastructure, the government of Zambia drastically increased amount of funding allocated to the Constituency Development Fund (CDF). This approach aims to decentralize government spending by having …

Too Much or Too Little Faith in Success? Experimental Evidence from Colombian Entrepreneurs

The high failure rate of new businesses in Colombia suggests a high entry rate among entrepreneurs with only low success potential. We test the hypothesis that this may be driven by the tendency to incorrectly estimate their success likelihoods. …