Under Review
Foreign Aid and the Performance of Bureaucrats (Job Market Paper)
Although much work examines foreign aid’s impact on development outcomes, its effect on bureaucracies—institutions that are key to development and profoundly influenced by aid interventions—remains understudied. I argue that project-based aid alters financial and social aspects of work over which bureaucrats hold salient preferences, generating tradeoffs that drive bureaucrats to redirect effort from routine functions toward donor funded initiatives. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and survey experiments with more than 600 Ugandan bureaucrats, I find that, despite preferring government funding and autonomy, bureaucrats are drawn to better paid aid projects, thus diverting effort away from regular duties. They also prefer departments with substantial donor funding, although it undermines the equity and teamwork they value. These findings reveal why aid can weaken bureaucracies: the same incentives that boost performance on donor projects divert effort from government programming and erode the organizational cohesion needed for lasting bureaucratic capacity.
The Effect of Government Intervention on the Operational Decisions of NGOs: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Three Countries
with Simon Hollerbauer, Graeme Robertson, Jeremy Springman, and Erik Wibbels.
Repressive governments seek to influence the behavior of domestic NGOs with both carrots and sticks. How do these efforts shape NGO operations? We identify common actions to influence NGOs: repressive and accomodative interventions in NGO operations, positive and negative rhetoric, and cooptation. Using a survey experiment of 425 NGO directors in Cambodia, Uganda, and Serbia, we investigate how community-level variation in the prevalence of these actions shape NGO preferences over where, how, and with whom they work. As expected, government interventions shape where NGOs prefer to work, raising concerns about how NGO benefits are distributed. Additionally, cooptation isolates NGOs, making them less likely to involve the public in planning or partner with other NGOs. However, moderate repression increases NGO preferences for organizing public action, suggesting NGOs see public mobilization as an effective strategy to resist some forms of repression. Importantly, these results hold across NGOs operating in very different sectors and countries. Panel data from Cambodia documents this finding in self-reported real-world behavior. These findings shed light on how NGOs navigate democratic backsliding.
Working Papers
Tax Morale and the Limits of Meritocracy
with Diego Romero
Taxes are essential for building state capacity. However, tax compliance largely hinges on citizens’ trust in the state, which remains elusive in many developing countries. Although citizens mainly interact with bureaucrats, little is known about how perceptions of the bureaucracy shape tax morale. This study explores whether citizens’ beliefs about meritocracy in recruitment and promotion affect their willingness to pay taxes. We hypothesize that non-meritocratic practices signal corruption and incompetence, undermining public trust and reducing tax compliance. Drawing on survey and survey experimental data from 1,500 households in 30 Guatemalan municipalities, we show that when citizens believe hiring is meritocratic, they rate their government as more competent and less corrupt. In contrast, when they believe bureaucrats are promoted without the mayor’s discretion, they perceive the bureaucracy as less competent and more corrupt. Moreover, while meritocratic hiring does not affect willingness to pay taxes or self reported tax payments, mayoral discretion over promotions is associated with lower willingness to pay taxes. These paradoxical findings highlight that bureaucratic professionalization and political oversight jointly matter for trust in the state and tax morale.
Work in Progress
Traditional Gender Norms, Clientelism, and Corruption: Survey of African Entrepreneurs
with Diego Romero, Harunobu Saijo, and Ghulam Dastgir Khan
This two-part study investigates how traditional gender norms—captured by the Male Dominance Index (MDI)—shape African entrepreneurs’ involvement in (1) corruption and (2) clientelism. First, in the corruption component, we ask whether patriarchal norms exacerbate gender disparities in bribery-related behaviors and attitudes. Specifically, we consider whether women in more male-dominant societies (a) report higher social pressure to offer bribes, (b) show lower willingness to engage in corrupt deals, (c) suffer higher levels of predatory extortion, (d) perceive reduced efficacy from corrupt exchanges, and (e) encounter harsher punishment for corrupt acts. Second, in the clientelism component, we probe whether patriarchal settings discourage female entrepreneurs from participating in electoral exchanges, such as vote-buying and turnout-buying, or from leveraging personal political connections. Here, we test whether women are targeted less by these inducements, have weaker ties to local powerbrokers, and face stronger social sanctions if they engage in clientelistic behavior. To test our hypotheses, we conduct a large-scale survey of 2,000–4,000 entrepreneurs (data collection is ongoing) across more than 15 African countries, matching each respondent’s self-identified ethnic affiliation to MDI scores. This allows us to pinpoint how male-dominant norms at the group level intersect with individual gendered experiences. Our measurement strategy includes direct questions about corruption and clientelism, as well as conjoint experiments.
Preferences for Corruption and Public Employment
with Diego Romero, Isabaeva Zharkyn, Harunobu Saijo, Ghulam Dastgir Khan, and Goto Daisaku
Interest in the public administrations of low-income countries has grown in recent years. While numerous studies have focused on how clientelism and opportunities for corruption and rent-seeking shape demand for public sector employees, fewer studies have examined how bureaucrats factor corruption into their decisions when choosing jobs. We study how bureaucrats make decisions about jobs and effort depending on the availability of corruption opportunities. Since corruption provides additional income to otherwise low-paid employees, we expect bureaucrats to prefer jobs with corruption opportunities. However, we expect this effect to be pronounced for bureaucrats with higher levels of education and muted for bureaucrats with higher prosocial motivation. To test our argument, we rely on a survey of approximately 1,000 bureaucrats in Kyrgyzstan, which included a conjoint experiment designed to elicit preferences over job offers and their willingness to apply effort given the presence (or absence) of opportunities for corruption.
Ongoing Projects
Refugee Perceptions of Resettlement Policy and Local Integration
with Manya Kagan, Guy Grossman, and Ibrahim Kasirye
Funded by: Displaced Livelihoods Initiative
Just 1 percent of displaced people are resettled to the 37 official resettlement countries, meaning many refugees face an uncertain future, and will spend a large part of their lives away from the homes they knew and without the possibility of resettlement. Our study examines refugees’ perceptions of resettlement criteria and how these perceptions affect their willingness to invest in local integration while living in host countries. We use Uganda, Africa’s largest refugee-hosting country, as our empirical case. Our exploratory study, which involved key informant interviews with local and international actors and focus group discussions with refugees, shows that refugees’ perceptions of resettlement opportunities strongly impact their investments in local integration efforts. Importantly, information around resettlement remains obscure, causing refugees to rely heavily on informal networks, overestimate their likelihood of resettlement, and underinvest in local integration. We plan to seek further funding for a two-stage randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing whether providing accurate resettlement likelihood information and teaching local language skills improves social and economic integration for refugees.