Information Technology and Government Decentralization: Experimental Evidence From Paraguay
成果类型：
Article
署名作者：
Dal Bo, Ernesto; Finan, Frederico; Li, Nicholas Y.; Schechter, Laura
署名单位：
University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
刊物名称：
ECONOMETRICA
ISSN/ISSBN：
0012-9682
DOI：
10.3982/ECTA17497
发表日期：
2021
页码：
677-701
关键词：
摘要：
Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors-middle managers-when ministerial leadership-the principal-introduced a new monitoring technology aimed at improving the performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs) in rural Paraguay. Our approach employs a novel experimental design that elicited treatment-priority rankings from supervisors before randomization of treatment. We find that supervisors have valuable information-they prioritize AEAs who would be more responsive to the monitoring treatment. We develop a model of monitoring under different scales of treatment roll-out and different treatment allocation rules. We semiparametrically estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) to demonstrate that the value of information and the benefits to decentralizing treatment decisions depend crucially on the sophistication of the principal and on the scale of roll-out.
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