Chapter 1 studies the effects of fighting corruption on public service delivery. While corruption crackdowns have been shown to effectively reduce missing government expenditures, their effects on public service delivery have not been credibly documented. This matters because, if corruption generates incentives for bureaucrats to deliver those services, then deterring it might actually hurt downstream outcomes. The chapter exploits variation from an anti-corruption program in Brazil, designed by the federal government to enforce guidelines on earmarked transfers to municipalities, to study this question. Combining random audits with a differences-in-differences strategy, we find that the anti-corruption program greatly reduced occurrences of over-invoicing and off-the-record payments, and of procurement manipulation within health transfers. However, health indicators, such as hospital beds and immunization coverage, became worse as a result. Evidence from audited amounts suggests that lower corruption came at a high cost: after the program, public spending fell by so much that corruption per dollar spent actually increased. These findings are consistent with those responsible for procurement dramatically reducing purchases after the program, either because they no longer can capture rents, or because they are afraid of being punished for procurement mistakes. Chapters 2 and 3 study the psychology of droughts. Chapter 2 tests whether uncertainty about future rainfall affects farmers’ decision-making through cognitive load. Behavioral theories predict that rainfall risk could impose a psychological tax on farmers, leading to material consequences at all times and across all states of nature, even within decisions unrelated to consumption smoothing, and even when negative rainfall shocks do not materialize down the line. Using a novel technology to run lab experiments in the field, we combine recent rainfall shocks and survey experiments to test the effects of rainfall risk on farmers’ cognition, and find that it decreases farmers’ attention, memory and impulse control, and increases their susceptibility to a variety of behavioral biases. Chapter 3 investigates whether index insurance can shield farmers against the cognitive effects documented in the previous chapter. In theory, insurance could mitigate those effects by alleviating the material consequences of rainfall risk. To test this hypothesis, we randomly assign offers of an index insurance product, and find that it does not affect farmers’ cognitive load. These results suggest that farmers’ anxiety might be relatively difficult to alleviate. / Political Economy and Government
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/33493343 |
| Date | 25 July 2017 |
| Creators | Lichand, Guilherme Finkelfarb |
| Contributors | Mullainathan, Sendhil, Nunn, Nathan, Glaeser, Edward, Rao, Gautam |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | open |
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