Research

Working Papers:

Reelection Incentives and Political Coercion: Evidence from Indonesian Villages   (Job Market Paper)

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 autocratic regime. Identification leverages staggered village election cycles set prior to Indonesia's nationwide democratization. I find that villages with leaders facing more proximate elections are more likely to support the autocratic regime. Additional evidence suggests that this effect is driven specifically by reelection concerns: I find that baseline results are generated entirely by village heads who are eligible for reelection, and village support for winning district parties is associated with lower rates of subsequent village head turnover. Finally, results disappear when villages receive large development grants through non-governmental actors, indicating that government transfers are a likely mechanism influencing local politicians.

Democratization and Political Responsiveness: Evidence from Indonesian Villages

Press: World Bank Development Impact Blog

Following democratization, how do elected politicians change the allocation of public resources in response to new voters? This paper studies this political responsiveness following Indonesia's transition to democracy, exploiting the staggered introduction of elected district heads for identification. By tracking outcomes across local governments, 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 percentage points greater across villages supporting the winning political party - an effect that's 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 may do so through new clientelist systems rather than broader investment in public goods.

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. Subsequent work will use data on village voting histories, village political leaders, and district institutions to explore possible reasons how incumbent parties benefit from funding that they do not control.

Mandatory Minimum Sentences and Plea Bargaining Outcomes

More than 90% of criminal cases in the US do not go to trial. Instead, the vast majority of cases are decided through negotiated plea bargaining. This paper will test whether the threat of severe criminal sentences at trial are leveraged by prosecutors to secure guilty pleas from defendants. While this is a common argument in the literature, rigorous empirical testing is made difficult by (a) the relative dearth of sentencing reform in the US, and (b) the shift in criminal behavior that would likely result from such reform in anticipation of modified sentences. To avoid these challenges, this paper will use variation in sentencing guidelines generated by the First Step Act of 2018, which dramatically reduced the set of criminal charges requiring the use of mandatory minimums. Importantly, the act adjusted these guidelines retroactively, so that they applied to the full universe of defendants already awaiting trial. This paper will develop a regression discontinuity design based on this temporal discontinuity in sentencing guidelines, comparing case outcomes for defendants sentenced just before and just after the act's passage. Key outcomes will include whether cases are decided by trial or plea, and the severity of resulting criminal convictions. (IRB approval granted, data acquisition in progress.)

Reelection Opportunities and Political Malfeasance

This project tests for electoral cycles in political corruption. While prior empirical work has identified reductions in politician malfeasance driven by reelection incentives, data limitations often make it difficult to measure the persistence of these effects. This work overcomes these challenges by observing annual measures of corruption across Indonesian districts, while leveraging staggered electoral cycles for Indonesian district heads for identification. Results show that observed corruption decreases just prior to mayoral elections, but recovers to baseline levels shortly thereafter. Results suggest that elections may induce short-term reductions in corrupt behavior, without generating sustained changes in corrupt behavior.

Lame Duck Politicians and Deforestation across Brazilian Municipalities

Do reelection incentives affect enforcement effort exerted to control illicit activities? This project seeks to answer this question across Brazilian municipalities, testing whether deforestation rates are higher under "lame duck" mayors immediately following failed reelection bids. Estimates are derived using monthly deforestation rates within each municipality, and make use of a two-month window where lame duck mayors continue to hold office prior to relinquishing power. Results show higher rates of deforestation under lame duck mayors, and are particularly pronounced when preceding elections were closer.