Employing a technological solution to monitor the attendance of public-sector health care workers in India resulted in a 15 percent increase in the attendance of the medical staff. Health outcomes improved, with a 16 percent increase in the delivery of infants by a doctor and a 26 percent...

This paper takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss...

Weak institutions ought to deter foreign direction investment (FDI), and mass media stories highlight China's institutional deficiencies, yet China is now one of the world's largest FDI destinations. This incongruity characterizes China's paradoxical growth. Cross-country regressions show that...

We attempt to make inferences about the elasticity of the government's demand for specific weapons by analyzing the statistical relationship between quantity and cost revisions across the population of major weapon systems, using data contained in the Pentagon's Selected Acquisition Reports. The...

Competitive exams are a standard method for selecting civil servants. Yet, evidence on the effectiveness of such approach is mixed, and lack of personnel data limits our understanding of the mechanisms underlying this varying success. We digitize personnel and financial data to study the impacts...

Property tax revenues - the largest discretionary source of revenue for local governments - adjust at a pace that is inconsistent with property values in the US. We show that this form of revenue smoothing may be rooted in the political economy of municipalities. Measures of local budget...

This paper examines if money matters in education by looking at whether missing resources due to corruption affect student outcomes. We use data from the auditing of Brazil's local governments to construct objective measures of corruption involving educational block grants transferred from the...

China's economic reforms over the past 40 years have led to a mixed economic structure with the government playing a key role in an increasingly market-driven economy. This paper expands a standard growth model of Barro (1990) to incorporate this structure, with a particular focus on including...

Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both...

Comprehensive evaluation requires tracking indirect effects of interventions, such as politicians and constituents reacting to the arrival of a development program. We study political economy responses to a large scale intervention in Bangladesh, where 346 communities consisting of 16,600...