Fighting corruption in education: What works and who benefits?

We investigate the distributional consequences of a corruption-fighting initiative in Romania targeting the endemic fraud in a high-stakes high school exit exam, which introduced CCTV monitoring of the exam and credible punishment threats for teachers and students. We find that the campaign was effective in reducing corruption and, in particular, that monitoring increased the effectiveness of the punishment threats. Estimating the heterogeneous impact for students of different poverty status we show that curbing corruption led to a worrisome score gap increase between poor and non-poor students. Consequently, the poor students have reduced chances to enter an elite university

Curbing adult student attrition: Evidence from a field experiment

Roughly 20% of adults in the OECD lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. In the UK, many colleges offer fully government subsidized adult education programs to improve these skills. Constructing a unique dataset consisting of weekly attendance records for 1179 students, we find that approximately 25% of learners stop attending these programs in the first ten weeks and that average attendance rates deteriorate by 20% in that time. We implement a large‐scale field experiment in which we send encouraging text messages to students. Our initial results show that these simple text messages reduce the proportion of students that stop attending by 36% and lead to a 7% increase in average attendance relative to the control group. The effects on attendance rates persist through the three weeks of available data following the initial intervention

The impact of an unexpected wage cut on corruption: Evidence from a “Xeroxed” exam

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage announcement. To measure corruption we compare changes in exam outcomes from 2007 to 2010 between public and private schools, as the latter were not affected by the policy. We find that the wage loss induced better exam outcomes in public than in private schools and we attribute this difference to increased corruption by public educators

State history and economic development: evidence from six millennia

The presence of a state is one of the most reliable historical predictors of social and economic development. In this article, we complete the coding of an extant indicator of state presence from 3500 BCE forward for almost all but the smallest countries of the world today. We outline a theoretical framework where accumulated state experience increases aggregate productivity in individual countries but where newer or relatively inexperienced states can reach a higher productivity maximum by learning from the experience of older states. The predicted pattern of comparative development is tested in an empirical analysis where we introduce our extended state history variable. Our key finding is that the current level of economic development across countries has a hump-shaped relationship with accumulated state history

The illicit benefits of local party alignment in national elections

How do central politicians in young democracies secure electoral support at grass-roots level? I show that alignment with local governments is instrumental in swaying national elections through, inter alia, electoral fraud. A regression discontinuity design with Romanian local elections and a president impeachment referendum in 2012 uncovers higher referendum turnouts in localities aligned with the government coalition - the impeachment initiators. Electoral forensics tests present abnormal vote count distributions across polling stations, consistent with ballot stuffing. The alignment effect, driven by rural localities, may explain the clientelistic government transfers found in this context and documented worldwide

Fighting Corruption in Education: What Works and Who Benefits?

We investigate the efficiency and distributional consequences of a corruptionfighting initiative in Romania targeting the endemic fraud in a high-stakes high school exit exam, which introduced CCTV monitoring of the exam and credible punishment threats. We find that punishment coupled with monitoring was effective in reducing corruption. Estimating the heterogeneous impact for students of different ability, poverty status, and gender, we show that fighting corruption led to efficiency gains (ability predicts exam outcomes better) but also to a worrisome score gap increase between poor and non-poor students. Consequently, the poor students have reduced chances to enter an elite university.JEL: I21, I24, K4

Transition to Agriculture and First State Presence: A Global Analysis

It has often been observed that the emergence of states in a region is typically preceded by an earlier transition to agricultural production. Using new data on the date of first state emergence within contemporary countries, we present a global scale analysis of the chronological relationship between the transition to agriculture and the subsequent emergence of states. We find statistically significant relationships between early reliance on agriculture and state age in all sub-samples. Our findings show that this relationship is not markedly different in cases where states were imposed from outside or when they emerged through internal origination.JEL classi cation: N50,O4

Transition to agriculture and first state presence: A global analysis

It has often been observed that the emergence of states in a region is typically preceded by an earlier transition to agricultural production. Using new data on the date of first state emergence within contemporary countries, we present a global scale analysis of the chronological relationship between the transition to agriculture and the subsequent emergence of states. We find statistically significant relationships between early reliance on agriculture and state age in all sub-samples and also when we use alternative sources of data at different levels of geographical aggregation. A one millennium earlier transition to agriculture among non-pristine states predicts a 317-430 year earlier state emergence. We uncover differences in cases where states were imposed from outside or when they emerged through internal origination. The agriculture-state lag is on average 3.1 millennia in internally originated (including pristine) states, and 2.7 millennia in externally originated states. We also explore some of the mechanisms through which agriculture is believed to have influenced the emergence of states. Our results indicate that the rise of social classes was often an intermediate step towards the presence of early states