Back to Search
Start Over
Information Technology and Government Decentralization: Experimental Evidence From Paraguay
- Source :
- Econometrica. 89:677-701
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- The Econometric Society, 2021.
-
Abstract
- 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.
- Subjects :
- Economics and Econometrics
Delegation
business.industry
media_common.quotation_subject
05 social sciences
Information technology
Middle management
Environmental economics
Decentralization
Value of information
Scale (social sciences)
0502 economics and business
Business
050207 economics
Sophistication
Agricultural extension
050205 econometrics
media_common
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 00129682
- Volume :
- 89
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Econometrica
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........e7143e63961117d153711e04df46b2ca