Research

Working Papers

Local Elites, Political Land Rents, and Incentives for Local Development: Evidence from Indonesia [updated version] [submitted]

Abstract: Much of rural development policy is implemented by traditional local leaders. Yet, it is unclear what is the most effective way to elicit effort from these leaders. This paper examines the long-run effects of awarding higher political land rents to elected village chiefs in Java, Indonesia. I exploit a historical policy that granted chiefs cultivation rights over village rice land (bengkok) in the early nineteenth century on one side of a historical border, but not the other. I use a spatial regression discontinuity design and original survey data to compare villages on either side of the border. I find that bengkok chiefs generated more local revenue, constructed more public goods, and villages continue to experience more positive economic outcomes. Rich survey data documents that bengkok improved the quality and selection of chiefs. In particular, consistent with Olson (1993)’s theory of stationary bandits, I provide suggestive evidence that bengkok increased service motivation and incentive alignment of chiefs with villagers. Taken together, my findings suggest that paying local leaders from a stable source of bottom-up, local revenue can have persistent effects on local governance and development outcomes

Media: World Bank Development Impact Blog Post, March 2020 Virtual PacDev Presentation (Berkeley)

Conference Presentations: NBER Fall Dev' 22, ASREC Europe '22 (London), ASREC Australasia '22 (Monash), AASLE'22 (UTokyo), SIOE'21, MWIEDC '20, CSAE '20, PacDev '20, NEUDC '20

Ethnic Segregation and Politics [draft available upon request] (joint with Chun Chee Kok)

How does inter-group contact shape preferences for ethnic politics? In this paper, we study how persistent differences in inter-ethnic contact affect voting patterns for ethno-nationalistic policies. Specifically, we leverage the effects of a large-scale colonial resettlement program where, in a fight for “hearts and minds”, villagers were relocated into 550 fenced-up, isolated, mono-ethnic camps. Using linked administrative data, we show that large-scale resettlement has a clear, causal effect on contemporary ethnic geography and continues to shape contemporary voting patterns.

Conference Presentations: Korean EHA '23 (Seoul), APSA '23 (LA), VHPE '21

Less Is More: Choice Overload, Saliency, and Deservingness in Online Charitable Donations (joint with Yohanes Eko Riyanto and Masyhur Hilmy)  [Submitted]

Online charitable donations can serve as a vital source of mutual aid, but the proliferation of donation choices could lead to information overload, potentially reducing donations. In collaboration with an Indonesian donation platform, we conduct a field experiment to investigate the impact of the choice set size and beneficiary traits on online giving. Smaller choice sets significantly increase the likelihood of donating and the donation amount, primarily due to heightened donor attention and reduced information overload. Donors spend more time deliberating over their donation decisions. In addition, regardless of the choice set size, donors pay greater attention to beneficiaries with greater perceived deservingness. Strikingly, this preference is more pronounced in smaller choice sets, possibly due to the heightened saliency of beneficiary characteristics in this context. Taken together, our results highlight the susceptibility of online donor behavior to choice overload and demonstrate the potential role of choice architecture in optimizing altruistic decision-making processes.

Conference Presentations: NEUDC '21

Selected Works In Progress

Inter-Group Contact and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia (joint with Chun Chee Kok and Abu Siddique) [Pilots Completed]

Nation building, or the ability to construct a strong, coherent, national identity, is crucial for long-run economic development. Doing so, however, is particularly challenging for ethnically diverse nation-states (Alesina and Zhuvarskaya 2011). In this project, we focus on one aspect -- the extent to which nation building efforts are shaped by (the lack of) macro-level contact across ethnic groups. A crucial problem is that individuals usually have a choice over where they live, and, by extension, whom they interact with. We circumvent this problem by studying a large-scale colonial resettlement program that created 550 mono-ethnic villages; nearly all of which still exist today. Plausibly exogenous placement of these villages offers us persistent inter-village variation in inter-ethnic group contact. Using this variation, we study the long-run effects of inter-group contact on national identity and nation-building efforts. To do so, we have secured funding to conduct an original, large-scale, in-person, retrospective survey. The final survey will measure inter-group contact rates, attitudes and proxies for national identity.

Language, Nation-Building, and Economic Development: Evidence from Indonesia (joint with Arya Gaduh and Chun Chee Kok)

Historical Migration, Long-Run Development and Trade Links (joint with Sebastian Ellingsen and Quoc-Anh Do)

Transportation Networks and Inter-Ethnic Contact (joint with Thomas Gautier and Alex Rothenberg)

Collectivism (joint with Yeonha Jung)