Direct Democracy and Resource Allocation: Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan

Resource Allocation Contests: Experimental Evidence

Across many forms of rent seeking contests, the impact of risk aversion on equilibrium play is indeterminate. We design an experiment to compare individuals’ decisions across three contests which are isomorphic under risk-neutrality, but are typically not isomorphic under other risk preferences. The pattern of individual play across our contests is not consistent with a Bayes-Nash equilibrium f...

Corruption and Resource Allocation: Evidence from China

Exploiting a unique data set containing transactions data from a panel of 769 Chinese stateowned enterprises between 1980 and 1989, this paper tests microeconomic implications of a pervasive form of corruption—official diversion of under-priced, in-plan goods to the market. Corruption has the predicted effects on resource allocation. Official under-pricing of in-plan goods, which lowers the mar...

Promoting Democracy in Afghanistan

Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy.

A novel experiment is used to show that the effect of a policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it is chosen democratically by the subjects than when it is exogenously imposed. In contrast to the previous literature, our experimental design allows us to control for selection effects (e.g. those who choose the policy may be affected differently by it). Our finding implies that democra...

Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

This paper presents an experiment where 48 Indonesian villages were randomly assigned to choose development projects through either representative-based meetings or direct election-based plebiscites. Plebiscites resulted in dramatically higher satisfaction among villagers, increased knowledge about the project, greater perceived benefits, and higher reported willingness to contribute. Changing ...