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. 

Working Papers

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

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.

Resource Scarcity and Cooperation

Climate change is likely to increase the risk of both transitory and prolonged water shortages in many developing countries. It is unclear how communities sharing joint water resources will respond to these shortages. This paper shows that water scarcity can have a different effect on cooperation over water, depending on whether the shortage is transitory or long term.  Using daily outlet-level water theft data from Pakistan, I first show that an unexpected short-term water shortage increases the probability of over-extraction of surface water. Then, I examine how farmers respond to long-term scarcity by exploiting a natural experiment that decreases the effective availability of groundwater – the key substitute for surface water – through an increase in groundwater pollution. The instrumented difference-in-differences estimates show that, in contrast to a short-term shock, long term scarcity increases inter-village cooperation. Moreover, farmers experiencing long-term scarcity become better at managing water theft under transitory water shortages. Finally, I provide evidence that informal institutions and caste networks are important for managing water theft under prolonged scarcity. Taken together, these results suggest that long-term environmental change can push communities to adapt by investing in informal mechanisms that enforce cooperation.

Work in Progress

Environmental Regulation and Firm Size (with James Fenske and Namrata Kala)

Evaluating the Impact of a Biometric Verification System: Evidence from the Benazir Income Support Programme (with Amen Jalal, and Kate Vyborny)