January 2025 - Working Paper33322 Community-based targeting, in which communities allocate social assistance using local information about who is poor, in experimental settings leads to nuanced allocations that reflect local concepts of poverty. What happens when it is scaled up, by either by making the stakes high, or by...
November 2024 - Working Paper33096 Many government social insurance policies have low take-up. To understand whether this is due to administrative barriers, information, or low valuation of the insurance, we study an unusual policy experiment in Thailand that offered a very large lump-sum incentive for informal workers in selected...
April 2024 - Working Paper32382 Social protection programs have become increasingly widespread in low- and middle-income countries, with their own distinct characteristics to match the environments in which they are operating. This paper reviews the growing literature on the design and impact of these programs. We review how to...

September 1, 2023 - Article
TransJakarta, the bus system serving greater Jakarta, Indonesia, undertook a major expansion in the last decade. It tripled its routes and doubled the number of buses in operation between January 2016 and February 2020. In Optimal Public Transportation Networks: Evidence from the Worlds Largest Bus...
June 2023 - Working Paper31369 Designing public transport networks involves tradeoffs between extensive geographic coverage, frequent service on each route, and relying on interconnections as opposed to direct service. These choices, in turn, depend on individual preferences for waiting times, travel times, and transfers. We...
January 2023 - Working Paper30905 Concerns about fraud in welfare programs common arguments worldwide against such programs. We conducted a survey experiment with over 28,000 welfare program administrators and over 19,000 beneficiaries in Indonesia to elicit the marginal disutility from corruption, i.e., the trade-between more...
April 2021 - Working Paper28641 Governments seeking to provide food assistance have a choice between providing in-kind food directly to beneficiaries, or providing vouchers that can be used to purchase food on the market. To understand the differences between these policies, the Government of Indonesia randomly phased in the...

November 1, 2019 - Article
A study of Indonesian reforms finds that sharpening focus and boosting staff-to-taxpayer ratios produced major revenue gains at minor expense. Most low-income countries collect between 10 and 20 percent of their GDP in tax revenue, in comparison to high-income countries average of nearly 40 percent....
September 2019 - Working Paper26204 To assess ways to achieve widespread health insurance coverage with financial solvency in developing countries, we designed a randomized experiment involving almost 6,000 households in Indonesia who are subject to a nationally mandated government health insurance program. We assessed several...
August 2019 - Working Paper26150 Developing countries collect a far lower share of GDP in taxes than richer countries. This paper asks whether changes in tax administration and tax rates can nevertheless raise substantial additional revenue and if so, which approach is most effective. We study corporate taxation in Indonesia,...
December 2018 - Working Paper25362 Many developing country governments determine eligibility for anti-poverty programs using censuses of household assets. Does this distort subsequent reporting of, or actual purchases of, those assets? We ran a nationwide experiment in Indonesia where, in randomly selected provinces, the government...
August 2018 - Working Paper24939 Developing country governments are increasingly implementing cash assistance programs to combat poverty and inequality. This paper examines the potential tradeoffs between targeting these transfers towards low income households versus providing universal cash transfers, also known as a Universal...
June 2018 - Working Paper24670 Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide, and are designed to promote comprehensive human capital investments in children, starting from encouraging pre-natal and maternal care and early childhood health interventions and continuing through incentivizing school attendance. Yet...
April 2017 - Working Paper23295 In cities worldwide, the widespread use of single occupancy cars often leads to traffic congestion and its associated ill effects. Using high frequency data from Google Maps, we test whether high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) policies can be an effective tool to combat congestion. Using the unexpected...
January 2016 - Working Paper21837 Outsourcing government service provision to private firms can improve efficiency and reduce rents, but there are risks that non-contractible quality will decline and that reform could be blocked by vested interests exactly where potential gains are greatest. We examine these issues by conducting a...
February 2015 - Working Paper20923 Can governments improve aid programs by providing information to beneficiaries? In our model, information can change how much aid citizens receive as they bargain with local officials who implement national programs. In a large-scale field experiment, we test whether mailing cards with program...
September 2014 - Working Paper20482 Employing a technological solution to monitor the attendance of public-sector health care workers in India resulted in a 15 percent increase in the attendance of the medical staff. Health outcomes improved, with a 16 percent increase in the delivery of infants by a doctor and a 26 percent reduction...
November 2013 - Working Paper19649 In this paper, we demonstrate that university students who cheat on a simple task in a laboratory setting are more likely to state a preference for entering public service. Importantly, we also show that cheating on this task is predictive of corrupt behavior by real government workers, implying...
June 2013 - Working Paper19127 Economic theory suggests that, when designing aid programs, ordeal mechanisms that impose differential costs for rich and poor can induce self-selection and hence improve targeting ("self-targeting"). We first re-examine this theory and show that ordeal mechanisms may actually have theoretically...
February 2013 - Working Paper18798 This paper investigates the impact of elite capture on the allocation of targeted government welfare programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and non-experimental data on a variety of existing government transfer programs. Conditional...
September 2012 - Working Paper18401 Existing learning models attribute failures to learn to a lack of data. We model a different barrier. Given the large number of dimensions one could focus on when using a technology, people may fail to learn because they failed to notice important features of the data they possess. We conduct a...
August 2012 - Working Paper18351 We use unique data from 600 Indonesian communities on what individuals know about the poverty status of others to study how network structure influences information aggregation. We develop a model of semi-Bayesian learning on networks, which we structurally estimate using within-village data. The...
August 2012 - Working Paper18349 Much of what we know about the marginal effect of pollution on infant mortality is derived from developed country data. However, given the lower levels of air pollution in developed countries, these estimates may not be externally valid to the developing country context if there is a nonlinear dose...
May 2012 - Working Paper18033 It is conventional wisdom that it is possible to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution, improve health outcomes, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the rural areas of developing countries through the adoption of improved cooking stoves. This belief is largely supported by observational field...
April 2012 - Working Paper17968 In this paper, we provide a new framework for analyzing corruption in public bureaucracies. The standard way to model corruption is as an example of moral hazard, which then leads to a focus on better monitoring and stricter penalties with the eradication of corruption as the final goal. We propose...
August 2011 - Working Paper17302 Moderate effects of pollution on health may exert an important influence on labor market decisions. We exploit exogenous variation in pollution due to the closure of a large refinery in Mexico City to understand how pollution impacts labor supply. The closure led to an 8 percent decline in pollution...
July 2011 - Working Paper17210 Using the most comprehensive data file ever compiled on air pollution, water pollution, environmental regulations, and infant mortality from a developing country, the paper examines the effectiveness of India's environmental regulations. The air pollution regulations were effective at reducing...
May 2010 - Working Paper15980 In developing countries, identifying the poor for redistribution or social insurance is challenging because the government lacks information about people's incomes. This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted in 640 Indonesian villages that investigated two main approaches to...
June 2009 - Working Paper15057 In this paper, we illustrate a methodology to measure discrimination in educational contexts. In India, we ran an exam competition through which children compete for a large financial prize. We recruited teachers to grade the exams. We then randomly assigned child "characteristics" (age, gender, and...
April 2008 - Working Paper13926 Many countries mandate affirmative action in university admissions for traditionally disadvantaged groups. Little is known about either the efficacy or costs of these programs. This paper examines affirmative action in engineering colleges in India for "lower-caste" groups. We find that it...
June 2006 - Working Paper12274 We follow 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a driver's license in New Delhi, India. To understand how the bureaucracy responds to individual and social needs, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: bonus, lesson, and comparison groups. Participants in the bonus...
December 2005 - Working Paper11880 In the rural areas of developing countries, teacher absence is a widespread problem. This paper tests whether a simple incentive program based on teacher presence can reduce teacher absence, and whether it has the potential to lead to more teaching activities and better learning. In 60 informal one...