Title: Better together? The unintended consequences of joint civic education training in a clientelist democracy

Abstract: Many civic education interventions seek to inform citizens about government officials' actions and duties in the hopes that citizens will reward and sanction officials to incentivize better performance. But in contexts where mechanisms for sanctioning poorly-performing officials are weak, empowering citizens through traditional civic education may instead create antagonism that leads officials to retreat and citizens to disengage. Through a field experiment conducted in collaboration with civil society partners across 224 villages in the northern Philippines, we test whether training citizens alongside local elected officials is more effective than training citizens alone. Our findings indicate that joint training did not make officials more responsive to citizen engagement. Instead, eight months after the intervention, officials in the joint training condition were less likely to have included citizen leaders in decision-making forums, and no more or less likely to express policy priorities consistent with their preferences.

Title: Optimal Allowance with Limited Auditing Capacity (with Albin Erlanson)

We analyze the mechanism-design problem of a principal allocating amounts of a perfectly divisible good to $n$ agents, each of whom desires as much of the good as possible. The principal has an ideal allocation for each agent, which is private information held by that agent. The principal has access to an auditing technology that allows her to perfectly uncover the private information of any $k$ ($<n$) of the agents. We present a tractable approach to solve for the principal's optimal mechanism. Agents may either accept a default amount or make an arbitrarily precise request. Agents submitting precise requests are audited randomly, with penalties for requesting more than their ideal allocation and rewards for requesting less.