Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
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Accountability and Public Goods Provision

Friday, December 5 –
Saturday, December 6, 2014

McKinney Conference Room

Registration required, email watsonevents@brown.edu.

The conference seeks to call attention to both the achievements and failings of lower and middle-income democracies in attaining government accountability for the effective and equitable delivery of public goods and services to citizens. The conference will bring together economists and political scientists to present theoretical and empirical work on government accountability with applications to democracies in Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.

Schedule:

Friday, December 5th

9:30-11:15:  Panel 1 Service Delivery (I)

Andrew Foster, Chair

Sri Nagavarapu, Brown: Short-term Service Delivery Improvements and Mobilization for Reforms: Evidence from Punjab's Public Distribution System

Ben Olken, MIT: Information is Power: Identification Cards and Food Subsidy Programs in Indonesia

Dan Posner, UCLA: (Under What Conditions) Do Politicians Reward their Supporters? Evidence from the Spatial Allocation of Constituency Development Funds in Kenya

11:30-1:15:  Panel 2 Service Delivery (II)

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Chair

Jennifer Bussell, Berkeley: Representation Between the Votes: Informal Citizen-State Relations in India

Daniel Keniston, Yale: Making Police Reform Real: The Rajasthan Experiment

Martin Rossi, U San Andres: First-Day Criminal Recidivism

2:15-4pm  Panel 3: Horizontal Accountability (I)

Rich Snyder, Chair

Daniel Hidalgo, MIT: Can Politicians Police Themselves? Natural Experimental Evidence from Brazil’s Audit Courts

Rohini Pande, Harvard: E-governance and Accountability: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Reform of India's Employment Guarantee Program

Matthew Winters, UI-UC: Foreign Aid and Government Legitimacy: Field Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

4:15-6pm  Panel 4, Voters and Accountability

Andrew Schrank, Chair

Carlos Pereira, FGV-Rio: Tolerance of Corruption or Ideological Blindness?

Fred Finan, UC Berkeley: Misallocation of Political Capital

Prerna Singh, Brown: Retrospective voting in two Indian states

Saturday, Dec 6

 9:00-10:45 Panel 5, Horizontal Accountability (II)

Thad Dunning, Chair

Ana De la O, Yale: The Effect of Federal and State Audits on Municipal Accountability: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

Julio Rios, CIDE: Justice System Institutions and Corruption Control: Evidence from the Mexican States

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Brown: Overseeing oversight: The logic of appointments to Brazilian state audit courts

11-12:45 Panel 6, Local Governance

Jesse Shapiro, Chair

Kate Baldwin, Yale: Custom vs. Rule of Law: An Experiment on Increasing Informal Accountability of Customary Leaders in Zimbabwe

Fabiana Machado, IADB: Decentralization and Accountability: The Curse of Local Underdevelopment?

Ryan Sheely, Harvard: Politicians’ Preferences and the Provision of Local Public Goods: Evidence from Kenya