Eric Dodge Publications

Poor implementation frequently impedes social protection delivery in low-state-capacity settings. In such environments, reducing managers’ information acquisition costs may improve their grasp of frontline issues and program performance. However, in the presence of managerial rent-seeking, increasing the principal’s information may be key, and doing so just for managers can backfire. To assess this trade-off and implications for program performance, we collaborated with two Indian states to randomly vary bureaucrat access to PayDash, a digital platform for real-time tracking of worker payment processing for the national rural workfare program. In treated districts, PayDash expedited bureaucrat processing of workfare payments by 17%, and increased available worksites and participating household work days by 23% and 10%, respectively. Work provision rose relatively more during the agricultural lean season. PayDash has the same impact when offered to principals as to managers, and no further gains when offered to both, indicating that manager effort to acquire information constrains implementation. Consistent with information allowing principals to better condition performance incentives on managerial effort, PayDash for principals reduced manager posting transfers by 24%. PayDash strengthened state capacity at a considerably lower cost than hiring staff, while benefiting rural Indians by more than 170 times the costs.

Can small search costs that constrain information acquisition and monitoring across the administrative hierarchy provide a substantive explanation for poor bureaucratic performance in the developing world? In collaboration with the Indian Ministry of Rural Development and two major states, we conducted a field experiment in which a random sample of bureaucrats were given access to an internet- and mobile-based management and monitoring platform for wage payments associated with the world’s largest workfare program. The platform did not make new information available, but lowered costs of accessing information about the status of pending payments and helped identify subordinate employees who needed to take action. Our experiment also randomly varied which level of the administrative hierarchy had e-platform access – senior and/or immediate managers. Overall, we find delays are 29% lower in areas where search costs are reduced for intermediate management alone. Across all treatment arms, areas with above median pre-period delays see delay reductions. While supervisor-only information provision is most impactful, we find evidence that app usage by intermediate supervisors reduces delays, and this usage is higher when senior officials also have e-platform access, suggesting complementarities across the administrative hierarchy are non-trivial. The extent of delay reductions achieved through minimal usage of the tool point to important service delivery improvements enabled by technology now widely available in capacity constrained settings. The authors are from Evidence for Policy Design (Dodge and Troyer Moore), Brown University (Neggers), and Harvard University (Pande). We thank Kartikeya Batra for field work and research assistance, and the J-PAL Governance Initiative and Gates Foundation for financial support.