We study a randomized Community Driven Reconstruction (CDR) intervention that provided two years of exposure to democratic practices in 1,250 villages in eastern Congo. To assess impacts, we examine behavior in a later village-level unconditional cash transfer project that distributed $1,000 to...

Social scientists generally enjoy substantial latitude in selecting measures and models for hypothesis testing. Coupled with publication and related biases, this latitude raises the concern that researchers may intentionally or unintentionally select models that yield positive findings, leading...

Social scientists have begun to work alongside developing country governments, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations on experimental projects that address fundamental questions in the political economy of development. We describe the range of projects that have taken...

A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet while the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through...

Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer have had an enormous impact on scholarship on the political economy of development. But as RCTs have become more central in this field, political scientists have struggled to draw implications from proliferating micro-level studies for longstanding macrolevel...

We examine whether gender quotas introduced by development agencies empower women. As part of a development program, an international organization created community management committees in 661 villages to oversee village level program expenditures. In a randomly selected half of these villages...