Due to inclement weather, this event has been postponed to a date yet to be determined. This page will be updated once the event has been rescheduled.
Featuring
Raymond Guiteras
Lead Economist
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Maryland
With Discussant
Owen Ozier
Economist, Development Economics Research Group
The World Bank
At the first 2014 MADS, Raymond Guiteras will present a recent paper addressing two inter-related questions: First, does aid potentially worsen development outcomes in the long run by reducing politicians’ accountability and allowing bad leaders to persist in office? Second, do voters attribute the effects of random shocks to the actions of politicians?
Guiteras will examine these questions in the context of a large-scale randomized intervention in rural Bangladesh that provided information on the importance of sanitation and, in randomly chosen neighborhoods, subsidies for sanitation improvements. He finds that the randomized intervention induced politicians to expend more effort to distinguish themselves from other leaders, thus benefitting constituents. Furthermore, the intensive information campaign created greater accountability, as the constituents became more informed about the communal sanitation needs, and the associated responsibilities of community leaders.
*Help us rename the MADS! You may have heard CGD is no longer located on Massachusetts Ave. We are therefore looking for a new name for the Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar (MADS). Send ideas to Events@CGDev.org. Extra points for ideas that yield MADS as an acronym!
Now in its thirteenth year, the MADS series brings some of the world's leading development scholars to discuss their new research and ideas. The presentations meet an academic standard of quality and are at times technical, but retain a focus on a mixed audience of researchers and policymakers.
