UC San Diego

This dissertation consists of three chapters which relate to public officials’ capacity and incentives to improve public services.Chapter 1 examines a setting in which government seeks to augment its capacity by enlisting the private sector. It uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to measure the effect of a Liberian school reform which outsourced management of public primary schools to private providers. It finds that outsourced public schools saw learning gains of 0.18 standard deviations in both English and mathematics on average, but the effects varied a lot by private provider. Chapter 2 turns to the question of whether improved public services yield electoral rewards for the officials responsible. It leverages the random variation in learning gains provided by Chapter 1’s randomized school reform in Liberia. On average, voters near treated schools were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for the incumbent party’s candidate than those near control schools. This negative average electoral effect, however, masks important heterogeneity. The negative electoral impact of the reform was concentrated in places where the reform reduced children’s learning. In places where the reform significantly improved test scores, it also produced electoral rewards. Chapter 3 also seeks to measure the electoral gains to public good provision, focusing on the construction of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) in the United States of America. It uses a shift-share estimator to isolate exogenous variation in the timing of IHS construction by county. It finds that a mile of IHS construction in an election year increases county-level vote share for the incumbent governor’s party by 0.6-2.2 percentage points during the period 1950-1972. These essays provide new empirical evidence of democratic accountability for public service provision, even as they illuminate directions for future research into the conditions in which democratic accountability binds.