【AEW Webinar】It Takes a Village Election: Turnover and Performance in Local Bureaucracies

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• 研討會日期 : 2025-09-11
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor Samuel Bazzi
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Samul Bazzi received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2013. He is currently a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. His research lies at the intersection of development economics and political economy, with a focus on how individuals and nations adapt to the challenges of diversity in a global world.
• 演講摘要 : In many countries, local governments struggle with inefficiency and corruption, often perpetuated by entrenched elites. This paper explores how leadership changes affect local bureaucratic performance. Combining personnel and citizen surveys with a regression discontinuity design in a large sample of Indonesian villages, we show that turnovers in village elections revitalize local bureaucracies, disrupt nepotistic networks, and improve local government performance. Bureaucrats serving new leaders are more engaged and less likely to be tied to past or present village officials, resulting in a more responsive bureaucracy that interacts more with citizens and better understands their needs. This improves public service provision, measured in both administrative data and citizen surveys. Overall, our results show that leadership changes can mitigate elite capture and improve governance at the grassroots level.
• Working Paper Title : Adulterated Spice: Lead Poisoning, Conflicts, and Fertility
• Working Paper Speaker : Professor Xinming Du
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Xinming Du received her Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from Columbia University in 2023. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. Her research examines how environmental stressors and regulations affect local socioeconomic outcomes, as well as nonlocal outcomes through trade linkages, air or ocean flow, social media networks, and transportation infrastructure. I also study greenwashing efforts and methane leakage from fossil fuel operations.
• Working Paper Abstract : We estimate the impacts of foodborne lead exposure on human outcomes. Despite the extensive literature on lead from water, traffic, and industrial sources, foodborne lead remains little studied or regulated. We focus on turmeric, a spice from the ginger family, often coated with lead chromate to enhance its color. Our identification strategy exploits Bangladesh's 2018 lead ban that successfully removed lead from turmeric. Comparing villages near the border of India and Bangladesh, fertility rates in Bangladesh increased by 9% and conflicts decreased by 11% per village-month following the 2018 policy for at least three years. Using trade and consumer expenditure data, we find US counties with higher historical exposure of imported turmeric exhibit higher blood lead levels and lower fertility rates. Bangladesh's removal of lead from turmeric corresponds to 1,750 additional births annually across the entire US.