TY - JOUR AU - Banerjee,Abhijit AU - Chattopadhyay,Raghabendra AU - Duflo,Esther AU - Keniston,Daniel AU - Singh,Nina TI - Can Institutions be Reformed from Within? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment with the Rajasthan Police JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17912 PY - 2012 Y2 - March 2012 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17912 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17912.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Abhijit Banerjee MIT Department of Economics 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-8855 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: banerjee@mit.edu Raghabendra Chattopadhyay Indian Institute of Management Calcutta Diamond Harbour Road Joka, Kolkata 700104 West Bengal INDIA E-Mail: rc@iimcal.ac.in Esther Duflo Department of Economics MIT, E52-252G 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617/258-7013 Fax: 617/253-6915 E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu Daniel Keniston Yale University P. O. Box 208269 New Haven, CT 06520-8269 Tel: 203/432-3620 Fax: 203/432-3898 E-Mail: daniel.keniston@yale.edu Nina Singh IPS Inspector General of Police Headquarters, Rajasthan Police Jaipur India E-Mail: ninasingh89@gmail.com AB - Institutions in developing countries, particularly those inherited from the colonial period, are often thought to be subject to strong inertia. This study presents the results of a unique randomized trial testing whether these institutions can be reformed through incremental administrative change. The police department of the state of Rajasthan, India collaborated with researchers at US and Indian universities to design and implement four interventions to improve police performance and the public’s perception of the police in 162 police stations (covering over one-fifth of the State’s police stations and personnel): (1) placing community observers in police stations; (2) a freeze on transfers of police staff; (3) in‐service training to update skills; and (4) weekly duty rotation with a guaranteed day off per week. These reforms were evaluated using data collected through two rounds of surveys including police interviews, decoy visits to police stations, and a large-scale public opinion and crime victimization survey—the first of its kind in India. The results illustrate that two of the reform interventions, the freeze on transfers and the training, improved police effectiveness and public and crime victims’ satisfaction. The decoy visits also led to an improvement in police performance. The other reforms showed no robust effects. This may be due to constraints on local implementation: The three successful interventions did not require the sustained cooperation of the communities or the local authorities (the station heads) and they were robustly implemented throughout the project. In contrast, the two unsuccessful interventions, which required local implementation, were not systematically implemented. ER -