The paper estimates the effect that changes in household vulnerability have on citizens' participation in clientelist relationships. The authors exploit two sources of variation in household vulnerability: rainfall shocks, and a randomized intervention that provided cisterns in drought-prone...

Bobonis, Gertler, Gonzalez-Navarro, and Nichter (2022) conducts a randomized control trial in rural Northeast Brazil designed to reduce the vulnerability of sampled households. In this development intervention, we constructed residential water cisterns across 425 neighborhood clusters in 40...

Does combating corruption reduce clientelism? We examine the impact of a prominent anti-corruption program on clientelism using a novel representative survey of rural Brazilians. Randomized audits reduce politicians' provision of campaign handouts, decrease citizens' demands for private goods,...

This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of road maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia's two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990-2007, we find that better roads help...