A key challenge in social benefit systems worldwide is the non-take-up (NTU) phenomenon, where eligible individuals do not claim the benefits to which they are entitled. This study evaluates the impact of two policy interventions—an in-person outreach program and a social media campaign—on reducing NTU through a large-scale randomized controlled trial involving 400 low-income neighborhoods in Spain. The interventions, targeted at reducing the NTU for the national minimum income scheme, were designed to address key informational and logistical barriers. The in-person treatment offered tailored support with application procedures and administrative coordination, while the social media campaign provided targeted information via Facebook and Instagram. We find that both interventions significantly increased application rates, though the temporal patterns differed—effects from in-person outreach were immediate, while those from social media emerged with a delay. However, neither intervention led to a substantial increase in benefit approvals, suggesting that while the interventions reduced initial frictions, persistent logistical barriers continue to hinder successful take-up. The results underscore the dual importance of informational and procedural hurdles in explaining NTU and point to the need for sustained, hands-on support to convert applications into successful claims.

The COVID-19 pandemic took place against the backdrop of growing political polarization and distrust in institutions. Did deficiencies in government performance further erode trust? Did citizens' ideology interfere with how they processed information on government performance? To investigate, we conducted a pre-registered online experiment in Spain in November 2020. The treatment group was provided with information on the number of contact tracers in their region, a policy under the control of regional governments. We find that individuals greatly overestimate the number of contact tracers. When we provide the actual number, we find declines in trust in governments, willingness to fund public institutions, and COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. We also find that individuals endogenously change their attribution of responsibilities when receiving the treatment. In regions where the regional and central governments are ruled by different parties, sympathizers of the regional incumbent react to the negative news on performance by attributing greater responsibility to the central government. We call this the ‘blame-shifting effect’. In these regions, the negative information does not reduce voting intention for the regional incumbent government. These results suggest that political accountability may be particularly difficult in settings with high polarization and where areas of responsibility are not clearly delineated.

The COVID-19 pandemic took place against the backdrop of growing political polarization and distrust in political institutions in many countries. Did deficiencies in government performance further erode trust in public institutions? Did citizens’ ideology interfere with the way they processed information on government performance? To investigate these two questions, we conducted a pre-registered online experiment in Spain in November 2020. Respondents in the treatment group were provided information on the number of contact tracers in their region, a key policy variable under the control of regional governments. We find that individuals greatly over-estimate the number of contact tracers in their region. When we provide the actual number of contact tracers, we find a decline in trust in governments, a reduction in willingness to fund public institutions and a decrease in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. We also find that individuals endogenously change their attribution of responsibilities when receiving the treatment. In regions where the regional and central governments are controlled by different parties, sympathizers of the regional incumbent react to the negative news on performance by attributing greater responsibility for it to the central government. We call this the blame shifting effect. In those regions, the negative information does not translate into lower voting intentions for the regional incumbent government. These results suggest that the exercise of political accountability may be particularly difficult in settings with high political polarization and areas of responsibility that are not clearly delineated.

This paper analyzes how changes in the concentration of political power affect long-run development. We study Brazil's military dictatorship whose rise to power dramatically altered the distribution of power of local political elites. We document that municipalities that were more politically concentrated prior to the dictatorship in the 1960s are relatively richer in 2000, despite being poorer initially. Our evidence suggests that this reversal of fortune was the result of the military's policies aimed at undermining the power of traditional elites. These policies increased political competition among traditional elites, leading to better governance, more public goods, and higher income levels.

Technological progress is widely recognized as a fundamental driver of economic development and structural transformation. Nevertheless, substantial variations in productivity persist both within and across countries. While the literature on misallocation has made important progress, we still have a limited understanding of the extent to which these misallocations are driven by political factors and the actions (or inactions) of governments. This paper reviews the literature on various political distortions, including state capture, patronage, and firm-political connections, and their impacts on economic outcomes. The review emphasizes empirical research, especially in low- and middle-income countries, highlighting the need for coherent theoretical frameworks and policy interventions to address political distortions. The paper also provides suggestions for future research, aiming to advance our understanding of the complex interplay between political dynamics and structural transformation.

This study examines how the economic effects of elections in rural China depend on voter heterogeneity, for which we proxy with religious fractionalization. We first document religious composition and the introduction of village-level elections for a nearly nationally representative sample of over two hundred villages. Then, we examine the interaction effect of heterogeneity and the introduction of elections on village-government provision of public goods. The interaction effect is negative. We interpret this as evidence that voter heterogeneity constrains the potential benefits of elections for public goods provision.

We posit that autocrats introduce local elections when their bureaucratic capacity is low. Local elections exploit citizens’ informational advantage in keeping local officials accountable, but they also weaken vertical control. As bureaucratic capacity increases, the autocrat limits the role of elected bodies to regain vertical control. We argue that these insights can explain the introduction of village elections in rural China and the subsequent erosion of village autonomy years later. We construct a novel dataset to document political reforms, policy outcomes, and de facto power for almost four decades. We find that the introduction of elections improves popular policies and weakens unpopular ones. Increases in regional government resources lead to loss of village autonomy, but less so in remote villages. These patterns are consistent with an organizational view of local elections within autocracies. (JEL D72, D73, D83, O17, O18, P25, P26)

The management of the COVID-19 pandemic represented one of the greatest challenges that policymakers had to face in recent history. The rapidly changing reality and directives may have contributed to a popular perception of erratic management of governments in many countries. In this paper, we investigate how people process information regarding the quality of the management of the pandemic in their region. We conduct an online experiment in Spain in November 2020. A randomly selected treated group obtained information on the number of contact tracers in their region, a key policy to manage the pandemic. We find that individuals greatly over-estimate the number of contact tracers in their region. When provided the actual number of contact tracers, individuals experience a significant reduction in trust in governments and other political institutions. We also find a reduction on individuals’ willingness to comply with government’s recommendation of getting vaccinated. Finally, we also find evidence that individuals’ ideological leanings affect how they process the negative news regarding the number of contact tracers. When the government is divided (different coalitions at the regional and central governments) those politically aligned to their regional government are more likely to shift blame to the central government for the deficient number of contact tracers. As a result, accountability is reduced in divided governments: vote intention for either the regional or the central government does not change after the information provition. In non-divided governments, by contrast, the governing coalition is electorally punished. These findings illustrates the difficulties in the exercise of political accountability when political preferences are polarized and when areas of responsibility are not well established.

In July 2011, the Pakistani public learnt that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had used a vaccination campaign as cover to capture Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban leveraged on this information and launched an anti-vaccine propaganda campaign to discredit vaccines and vaccination workers. We evaluate the effects of these events on immunization by implementing a difference-in-differences strategy across cohorts and districts. We find that vaccination rates declined between 23% and 39% in districts in the 90th percentile of Islamist support relative to those in the 10th percentile. These results suggest that information discrediting vaccination campaigns can negatively affect trust in health services and demand for immunization.

Using two novel online surveys collected in May and November 2020, we study the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on Spanish households. We document a large and negative effect on household income. By May 2020, the average individual lived in a household that had lost 16% of their pre-pandemic monthly income. Furthermore, this drop was highly unequal: while households in the richest quintile lost 6.8% of their income, those in the poorest quintile lost 27%. We also document that the pandemic deepened the gender-income gap: on average, women experienced a three-percentage point larger income loss than men. While this is consistent with previous findings in the literature, in this paper we document that this effect is driven by women from middle-income households with kids. Finally, we provide evidence that Spanish individuals experienced moderate declines in their levels of psychological well-being. This effect is not different for individuals living in rich or poor households, but the reasons behind well-being losses do differ: richer individuals are more concerned about loss of contact with dear ones, while low-income individuals are more likely to mention loss of income and employment as a key source of emotional distress.

This paper studies the labor supply of South Indian boat owners using daily labor participation decisions of 247 boat owners during seven years. We test the standard neoclassical model of labor supply and find that boat owners’ labor participation depends positively on expected earnings but also on recent accumulated earnings, albeit weakly. Participation elasticities with respect to expected earnings range between 0.8 and 1.3 and about −0.05 and −0.01 with respect to changes in recent income. While recent earnings affecting participation is at odds with the standard neoclassical model, the magnitude of the effect is small, suggesting that the neoclassical model is a good approximation of the labor supply behavior of boat owners in southern India.

We propose a simple informational theory to explain why autocratic regimes introduce local elections. Because citizens have better information on local officials than the distant central government, delegation of authority via local elections improves selection and performance of local officials. However, local officials under elections have no incentive to implement unpopular centrally mandated policies. The model makes several predictions: i) elections pose a trade-off between performance and vertical control; ii) elections improve the selection of officials; and iii) an increase in bureaucratic capacity reduces the desirability of elections for the autocrat. To test (i) and (ii), we collect a large village-level panel dataset from rural China. Consistent with the model, we find that elections improve (weaken) the implementation of popular (unpopular) policies, and improve official selection. We provide a large body of qualitative and descriptive evidence to support (iii). In doing so, we shed light on why the Chinese government has systematically undermined village governments twenty years after they were introduced.

We provide novel evidence that culture is an important determinant of the e ectiveness of formal democratic institutions. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations in Chinese rural villages, the most important of which is the village temple, a salient node for social and associational life in this setting. We use the introduction of village elections as an improvement in formal institutions. When elections were introduced, villages with temples experienced much larger increases in public goods than villages without temples. These results suggest that formal and informal institutions are complementary, and that the presence of social capital is a necessary pre-condition for successful elections. JEL: P16, H41;

Democracies widely differ in the extent to which powerful elites and interest groups retain influence over politics. While a large literature argues that elite capture is rooted in a country's history, our understanding of the determinants of elite persistence is limited. In this paper, we show that allowing old-regime agents to remain in office during democratic transitions is a key determinant of the extent of elite capture. We exploit quasi-random from Indonesia: Soeharto-regime mayors were allowed to finish their terms before being replaced by new leaders. Since mayors' political cycles were not synchronized, this event generated exogenous variation in how long old-regime mayors remained in their position during the democratic transition. Districts with longer exposure to old-regime mayors experience worse governance outcomes, higher elite persistence, and lower political competition in the medium run. The results suggest that slower transitions towards democracy allow the old-regime elites to capture democracy.

The extension of mass education not only affects the level of education of the labor force, but also raises the average education of local politicians. This paper investigates the impact of a large program of school construction in Indonesia on local governance and public good provision. By using a panel dataset of 10,000 villages and exploiting the staggered timing of local elections, I isolate the effects driven by changes in local governance. The results suggest that the school construction program lead to important increases in the provision of public goods. Furthermore, the results are heterogeneous with villages experiencing stronger increases in public goods for which there was greater demand. I provide evidence that the results are driven by the higher education of the incumbent local politician, which suggests that the level of human capital of local politicians is a key ingredient of public good provision in developing countries. JEL Classification: D72, P16, O12, O17

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