Working Papers:
Democratization and Political Responsiveness: Evidence from Indonesian Villages
Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Development Economics
Press: World Bank Development Impact Blog
This paper studies changes in political responsiveness following Indonesia's transition to democracy. Leveraging the staggered introduction of elected district heads, event study estimates compare the allocation of resources with and without an elected politician in office, at the same point in time, within the same broader institutional context. When elected district heads take office, night light growth is 2.6 percent greater across villages supporting the winning political party - an effect driven by districts with stronger media presence and political competition in the baseline. These effects, however, are not associated with improvements in local public goods. Disparities in night light growth are more pronounced during village head election years, suggesting that village officials - in addition to voters - are targeted with preferential favors by elected district administrations. Taken together, results suggest that democratization reshapes political responsiveness across new voter constituencies, but does so in part through new clientelist systems rather than broader investment in public goods.
Reelection Incentives and Political Coercion: Evidence from Indonesian Villages
Reelection incentives are intended to hold politicians accountable to voters. This paper tests whether central governments can exploit these incentives to control local politicians. I study this phenomenon during Indonesia's transition to democracy, testing whether village head reelection concerns induce greater support for the incumbent administration. Leveraging staggered village election cycles for identification, I find that villages with leaders facing more proximate elections are more likely to support the party of the autocratic regime. Results are generated entirely by village heads who are eligible for reelection, suggesting that effects are driven specifically by approaching reelection campaigns. Finally, results disappear when villages receive large development grants through non-governmental actors, pointing towards government transfers as a likely mechanism influencing local politicians.
Decentralization and Political Accountability: Evidence from Indonesia's 2014 Village Law
Theory suggests that decentralization can increase the efficiency of public service delivery - but only if elections are able to select accountable leaders. This paper tests this relationship between elections, accountability, and development outcomes following a large decentralization reform in Indonesia. By interacting simultaneous revenue windfalls with staggered election cycles at the village level, this reform generates plausibly exogenous differences in the exposure of villages to newly-appointed village heads following the reform. Findings suggest that newly-elected politicians generate increases in public service provision and night light intensity. Meanwhile, elections following the reform are associated with turnover in under-performing village heads, the appointment of better educated village heads, and heightened implementation of accountability measures mandated by the reform.
Selected Work in Progress:
Incumbent Advantage and Community-Driven Development
Existing literature has shown that development funding may exacerbate incumbent advantage when distributed directly to voters. This project tests whether community-driven development programs avoid these political distortions by putting funding directly in the hands of local communities, while explicitly removing politician control over the allocation of funding. To do so, I use data from Indonesia's Kecamatan Development Program, which ultimately distributed more than $700 million across more than 30,000 villages. Importantly, funding was distributed based on arbitrary population thresholds across local polities. Using a regression discontinuity design based on these population thresholds, I find that villages receiving larger development grants were more likely to support the incumbent political party in each district. Results are more pronounced in villages with greater voter turnout, and are reversed entirely - generating decreases in incumbent support - within villages that do not manage to secure program funding. Taken together, findings suggest that international aid can distort political attribution and accountability, even when politicians do not control funding allocations.
Mandatory Minimum Sentences and Plea Bargaining Outcomes
More than 95% of criminal cases in the U.S. do not go to trial. Instead, the vast majority of cases are decided through negotiated plea bargaining. This project tests whether the threat of severe criminal sentences at trial are leveraged by prosecutors to secure both guilty pleas and cooperation from defendants. Rigorous testing of this hypothesis has been made difficult by (a) the relative dearth of sentencing reform in the U.S., and (b) the shift in criminal behavior that would likely result from the anticipation of such modified sentences. To avoid these challenges, this project uses variation in sentencing guidelines generated by the First Step Act of 2018, which expanded the set of criminal defendants who were eligible to be sentenced without the use of mandatory minimums. Importantly, the act adjusted these guidelines abruptly and unexpectedly - thereby limiting potential anticipation effects - and allowed these changes to apply retroactively, so that they affected the full universe of defendants already awaiting trial. Following the act's passage, newly eligible defendants experienced a 85% drop in the application of mandatory minimums, and a 20% drop in total prison sentence lengths. Despite this sharp improvement in bargaining power, eligible defendants are no less likely to plead guilty. Instead, newly eligible defendants are less likely to assist the government in prosecuting other defendants, suggesting that the threat of severe sentences at trial is in fact leveraged by prosecutors to coerce defendant cooperation in the baseline.
Criminal Records and Legal Employment
Judicial Bias and Dynamic Sentencing Behavior
Reelection Opportunities and Political Malfeasance
Lame Duck Politicians and Deforestation across Brazilian Municipalities