We examine the impact of ethics and integrity training on police officers in Ghana through a randomized field experiment. The program, informed by theoretical work on the role of identity and motivation in organizations, aimed to re-activate intrinsic motivations to serve the public, and to...

The politically motivated replacement in local governments is a pervasive fact in our modern democracies. Whether it has causal effects on the quality of public services, such as education, is a critical question and yet understudied. This paper uses a regression discontinuity design (RDD) for...

We provide evidence that German public energy providers, over which municipality-level politicians hold substantial sway, systematically adjust the pricing of electric energy in response to local electoral cycles. The documented pattern is in line with both, an artificial reduction in prices...

Standard anticorruption interventions consist of intensified monitoring and sanctioning. Rooted in principal-agent theory, these interventions are based on the assumption that corrupt acts follow a rational cost-benefit calculation by gain-seeking individuals. Given their mixed results, however,...

We estimate the causal effect of harsher speeding punishments on future driving behavior of cited drivers. To account for the fact that punishments are not randomly assigned, we leverage variation in ticket-writing practices across highway patrol officers in Florida. The fine associated with a...