Selected Work in Progress

Decentralization and Development
(with Nurina Merdikawati and Tejaswi Velayudhan)

The Village Transfer Multiplier
(with Nurina Merdikawati and Tejaswi Velayudhan)

Ethnic Favoritism and Fiscal Discretion
(with Tejaswi Velayudhan)

Elite Interests and Fiscal Development in U.S. States
(with Pablo Beramendi, Mark Dincecco, and Melissa Rogers)
​Do Intergovernmental Grants Improve Public Service Delivery in Developing Countries?​
November 2020
Working paper
I exploit unusual policy variation in Indonesia to examine how local responses to intergovernmental grants depend on their persistence. A national reform produced permanent increases in the general grant that were larger for less densely populated districts. Hydrocarbon-rich districts experienced transitory shocks to shared resource revenue. Public service delivery strongly responded to the permanent shock, but not to the transitory shocks, consistent with districts providing lumpy public services as a function of lifetime fiscal resources. I provide supporting evidence for this mechanism and rule out other potential mechanisms. I discuss implications for decentralization policy and research on taxation and accountability.
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Revenue Persistence and Public Service Delivery
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Your abstract text goes here. This paper examines resource extraction, revenue sharing, and their impacts on economic growth...
This paper investigates the relationship between government fragmentation and economic growth. We find that...
We examine how revenue persistence affects public service delivery outcomes...
This paper studies the introduction of state income taxes in U.S. states and its effects on fiscal capacity and migration patterns...
We leverage variation in petroleum geology to identify the long-run effects of oil wealth on development outcomes...
This paper analyzes how politicians' age affects their policy choices and electoral outcomes...
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Here is my abstract!
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