BREAD Working Paper No. 597, October 2021

Persuading Voters to Punish Corrupt Vote Buyers: Experimental Evidence from a Large-Scale Radio Campaign in India Laura Schechter and Srinivasan Vasudevan   Abstract During the 2014 Indian general elections, we carried out a large-scale experiment randomizing a radio campaign highlighting the disadvantages of voting for corrupt vote-buying politicians. Official electoral data shows that the radio […]

BREAD Working Paper No. 537

Governing the Commons? Water and Power in Pakistan’s Indus Basin Hanan G. Jacoby, Ghazala Mansuri Abstract Surface irrigation is a common pool resource characterized by asymmetric appropriation opportunities across upstream and downstream water users. Large canal systems are also predominantly state-managed. We study water allocation under an irrigation bureaucracy subject to corruption and rent-seeking. Data […]

BREAD Working Paper No. 557, December 2018

Social Proximity and Bureaucrat Performance: Evidence from India Guo Xu, Marianne Bertrand, Robin Burgess Abstract Using exogenous variation in social proximity generated by an allocation rule, we find that bureaucrats assigned to their home states are perceived to be more corrupt and less able to withstand illegitimate political pressure. Despite this, we observe that home […]