Working Papers

Resource Scarcity and Cooperation (revise and resubmit, The Quarterly Journal of Economics) 

Climate change is expected to increase both transitory and prolonged water shortages in many developing countries. Such shortages may either worsen resource sharing, by increasing the temptation to behave opportunistically or improve sharing by raising the returns to cooperation. Using geo-coded panel data on water theft incidents in Pakistan, I show that water scarcity has different effects on cooperation over water, depending on whether the shortage is transitory or long-term. Short-term water shortages increase illegal surface water diversions on irrigation sub-canals, resulting in reduced water availability for downstream villages. In contrast, long-term water scarcity reduces these illegal diversions, improving water access for downstream communities. Both informal institutions and caste networks are important for reducing water theft under prolonged scarcity. Taken together, these results suggest that communities may be able to adapt to long-term environmental change by investing in informal mechanisms that enforce cooperation.

How Rules and Compliance Impact Organizational Outcomes: Evidence from Delegation in Environmental Regulation (with James Fenske and Namrata Kala) (submitted)

Formal rules within organizations are pervasive, but may be interpreted and implemented differently by actors within the organization, impacting organizational outcomes. We consider a delegation reform that changed formal rules within the environmental regulator in an Indian state, by giving decision rights to junior officers over certain types of applications. Using novel data on firms’ environmental permit applications and internal communications within the regulator, we study how the delegation of formal authority affects its actual allocation, the consequences on applicant firms, and the circumstances that lead senior officers to withhold this authority. The change in decision rights had consequences for the applicant firms, since junior officers are more likely to accept applications. Furthermore, only two thirds of applications that should have been delegated according to the rules were actually delegated. Next, we show that senior officers chose to retain decision rights over more difficult applications, namely, applications with higher pollution potential and from less common industries. Furthermore, senior officers with greater histories of public complaints, those with lower propensities to inspect applications, and those facing a higher backlog of applications are more likely to delegate. These results are consistent with a framework where delegation is determined by a knowledge hierarchy (problems of greater complexity are resolved higher in the organizational hierarchy), and where different senior officers face varying costs of delegation at different times.

Publications

Data, discretion and institutional capacity: Evidence from cash transfers in Pakistan (with Kate Vyborny), Journal of Public Economics

Policy Brief, Survey questionnaire

Administrative data is key to many government functions; but generating and maintaining it is costly and challenging in low-income countries.  We study an overhaul of public assistance in Pakistan that created a national database of household assets and used the data to means-test cash transfers, eliminating discretion in their allocation.  We use difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity approaches to quantify the effect of this reform.  Favoritism and transfers to wealthy households dropped; we estimate welfare benefits of the reform seven times its costs.  The reform improved public support for social assistance, creating a robust institution that survived political transitions.