Working papers

• Command and Can't Control: Assessing Centralized Accountability in the Public Sector (submitted)- with Saad Gulzar (Notre Dame), Muhammad Zia Mehmood (Princeton), Daniel Rogger (World Bank)

A long-established approach to management in government has been the transmission of information up a hierarchy, centralized decision-making by senior management, and corresponding centralized accountability; colloquially known as "command and control". This paper examines the effectiveness of a centralized accountability system implemented at scale in Punjab, Pakistan for six years. The scheme automatically identified poorly performing schools and jurisdictions for the attention of central management. We find that flagging of schools and corresponding de facto punishments had no impact on school or student outcomes. We use detailed data on key elements of the education production function to show that command and control approaches to managing the general public sector do not induce bureaucratic action towards improvements in government performance.

• Pay-to-play: Campaign Contributions and Long-term Distortions in Public Procurement - with Saad Gulzar (Notre Dame) and Juan Felipe Riaño (Georgetown). 

Political contributions can distort the allocation of public resources, yet the mechanisms that allow favoritism toward campaign donors to persist remain poorly understood. Using administrative data linking campaign contributions in mayoral elections to the universe of procurement contracts in Colombia from 2012 to 2025, we show that donors not only obtain more valuable discretionary contracts and experience more and larger cost overruns, but also retain these advantages, relative to non-donors, even long after their political connections disappear and despite of strict regulations. To identify the frictions that sustain these persistent distortions, we implement a nationwide randomized controlled trial in partnership with the Inspector General’s Office, investigative journalists, and two civil society organizations. The intervention provides recently elected mayors with information on procurement rules related to donations and equips their different principals with monitoring capacity. This design allows us to identify the source of informational asymmetries that limit principals' ability to detect and discipline favoritism. Cost-effective deterrence emerges only when both legal principals and mayors receive actionable information that reveals the identity and recent contracting activity of donors. Leveraging this variation and the administrative data, we estimate a dynamic structural model that jointly incorporates the two key selection margins, donation and entry, through which forward looking individuals and firms choose how to behave over electoral cycles. The model estimates the sunk and operational costs that sustain favoritism and the rest of the reduced form patters, while reconciling the surprisingly low scale of political giving relative to its apparent large returns. Counterfactual policy exercises show how typical regulatory interventions can reduce welfare and why they rarely eliminate the distortions created by campaign contributions. 

Best paper in Public Procurement at the World Bank Conference on Public Institutions for Development

Articles

• One Step Ahead of the Law: The Net Effect of Anticipation and Implementation of Colombia's Illegal Crops Substitution Program - with Santiago Saavedra (URosario) and Daniel Wiesner (C-Analisis). Journal of Public Economics 202, 104498 [Data&Code]

Work in progress

• Election Day is Firing Day: Political Turnover, Patronage and Monitoring - with Anton Arbman-Hansing (IIES) and Arstchil Okropiridse (IIES). 

• The Political Economy of Environmental Protection: Evidence from India - with Muhammad Zia Mehmood (UC Berkeley) and Suraj R. Nair (UC Berkeley)