Current Research


“Can Citizen Pressure be Induced to Improve Public Service Provision?”
with Pia Raffler and Doug Parkerson
(VoxDev Article)  (IPA Policy Brief)  (IPA Study Summary)

Encouraging citizens to apply pressure on underperforming service providers has emerged as a prominent response to the failure of states to provide needed services. We outline three theoretical mechanisms through which bottom-up citizen pressure campaigns may affect service provision and investigate them via a large-scale field experiment in the Ugandan health sector. While we find modest positive impacts on health provider behavior, we find no effects on citizen pressure, utilization rates, or bottom-line health outcomes. Our findings cast doubt on the power of outside actors to generate improvements in development outcomes by mobilizing bottom-up pressure—at least under conditions similar to those in our study setting. Our results underscore the importance of baseline health conditions for the success of bottom-up, citizen-oriented pressure campaigns. Such conditions shape outcomes both across countries and within countries over time, with the latter finding holding important implications for countries undergoing rapid socioeconomic change.(Pre-Analysis Plan)


“Ethnic Bias in Urban and Rural Africa”

The project investigates whether coethnic bias (defined as differential altruism toward coethnics and non-coethnics) differs across urban and rural residents in Kenya. The project follows up on the results reported in Berge et al (2020), which investigates coethnic bias among residents of Nairobi and finds no evidence of bias—except among subjects who had lived in Nairobi for fewer than ten years. These findings suggest that, contrary to the expectations of modernization theory, urban residence may dampen rather than heighten coethnic bias. A key implication is that we should see differences in the levels of coethnic bias across urban and rural samples. To measure coethnic bias, I compare patterns of play in Dictator, Public Goods, and “Choose Your Dictator” games across coethnic and non-coethnic partners recruited in urban and rural settings in Kenya. Although prior work has employed behavioral games to measure coethnic bias, this research has been limited either to urban or rural domains. No research to my knowledge has been designed explicitly to compare levels of coethnic bias in urban and rural settings using these techniques.


“Tracking the Leakage of Development Goods Using iBeacon Technology”

with Jenny Hamilton and Muthoni Nganga

The leakage of development goods is a major challenge for governments and the aid industry, and a leading preoccupation of development practitioners and academic researchers. Although commonly reported and lamented, such leakage is challenging to quantify precisely. We address this evidentiary blind spot by piloting the use of iBeacon technology to track the distribution of solar lanterns distributed by village heads in off-grid communities in Western Kenya. We provide evidence on the efficacy of the technology for detecting the lanterns and tracking their movement over time. We then draw on survey data collected in every household in which a lantern was ever detected and a random sample of other households to better understand why some households received the lanterns and others did not. We find evidence consistent with the faithful execution of program guidelines, with deviations explained largely by the desire to aid needy community members who would otherwise have been excluded. Our findings run against common depictions of local African elites as predatory actors seeking to capture development resources for their own ends, and suggest the need to rethink the common equation of “leakage” or “misallocation” with malfeasance.


“Uncovering Ethnic Discrimination: Using Distraction to Detect Hidden Bias in Economics Games”

with Jenny Hamilton and Chad Hazlett

Behavioral economics games such as the Dictator Game (DG) have been widely used to quantify ethnic or other between-group biases. However, in numerous contexts where ethnicity is thought to be extremely salient, the DG has failed to detect any evidence of ethnic bias. One compelling explanation is that economics games like the DG are strongly influenced by social desirability concerns—including the concern that one should not reveal one’s biases toward members of other ethnic groups. We propose a technique for testing whether social desirability may prevent the DG from detecting ethnic bias. This is done by comparing the results of the traditional DG with results of a modified DG that is played in the context of a distraction task. We hypothesize that playing the DG in the context of such a task depletes the cognitive resources required by participants to monitor and control their responses in keeping with societal demands. If true, we expect that ethnic biases, when present, would be more apparent in a DG played during the distraction task.

 

“Modulating Our Better Angels: A Brain Stimulation Study of Cognitive Processes Underlying Effortful Control of Racism”
with Chad Hazlett, Marco Iacobini, and Akila Kadambi

Efforts that many people make to avoid showing biases toward other ethnic or racial groups, while not always sufficient or effective, are critically important to how we treat each other and to the functioning of our diverse society. While this “effort to control racism” has long been studied in social psychology, we know little about  its neurocognitive underpinnings. Our previous work shows that two prefrontal areas of the brain modulate generosity towards others, with the DLPFC particularly operative in controlling racist impulses. We posit they may also control racism. Using multiple assessments of bias and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) we aim to show  that transient inhibition of these areas may reduce the ability to override implicit biases, enhancing racially biased behavior. These results will contribute to an early understanding of how to modulate functional mechanisms to overcome racial bias.


“Promoting Reconciliation in Conflict-Affected Communities in Mali”

with Chad Hazlett and Salma Mousa

The ongoing conflict in Mali has deepened inter-group tensions in many communities. In partnership with USAID, we are designing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of an intervention designed to promote reconciliation in conflict-affected communities in the Mopti and Ségou regions of the country. The intervention and accompanying evaluation will allow us to test the relative and joint impacts of cash transfers and more traditional conflict regulating programming on inter-group tensions.


“Evaluating the Effectiveness of ‘Root Causes of the Conflict’ Workshops for Victims of Farmer-Herder Conflicts in Nigeria”

with Adejumo Oluwabunmi, Efobi Uchenna, and Jiyoung Kim

Resource-based conflict is a widespread issue that leads to violence, disruption of peaceful coexistence between communities, and disintegration of social ties. Working in IDP camps in herder-farmer zones in Nigeria, we evaluate how exposure to information about the climate change-related factors that induced herders to migrate into farming lands may generate greater acceptance of herders by farmers and improvements in inter-community relations.


“Tensions in Knowledge Accumulation Using Coordinated Intervention Experiments to Improve Public Policy”

with Jake Bowers, Natasha Greenberg, and Morgan Holmes

We introduce and explain the value of coordinated randomized experiments for informing international development funding decisions, and then articulate tensions inherent in these coordinated experiments, emphasizing the tradeoffs that reasonable decision makers might face given choices between coordinated and uncoordinated experiments. We then provide some rough guides to help decision makers navigate those tensions. We write from the perspective of encouraging coordinated experiments, but want to offer practical alternatives that might be easier to implement than extant models.