Introducing financial incentives to increase productivity in the public sector tends to be politically and bureaucratically cumbersome, particularly in developing countries. Behavioral interventions could be a low-cost alternative, both politically and financially, although evidence of their...

Merit-based selection of bureaucrats is central to state capacity building, yet rare in developing countries. Most executives instead favor patronage -political discretion- in public employment. This paper proposes and tests an original theory to explain when executives forsake patronage for...

The challenge of public administration reform is well-known: politicians often have little interest in the efficient implementation of government policy. Using new data from 439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries, we demonstrate that such reforms are significantly less likely...

This paper documents the effects of an intervention on knowledge sharing, in which information embedded in efficient private organizations is used to improve bureaucratic procedures of public agencies. In particular, it analyzes the impact of the Knowledge for Results (K4R) program on the...

Latin America and the Caribbean is the most violent region in the world, with an annual homicide rate of more than 20 per 100,000 population and with an increasing trend. Yet most evidence of crime concentration, geo-temporal patterns, and event dependence comes from cities in high-income...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries’ growth would benefit from reductions in barriers to trade. However, the empirical basis for judging trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; policies are poorly measured;...