Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation during the 2018 property tax collection campaign to test the impact of delegating tax collection to local chiefs. Where local chiefs collected taxes, households were more tax compliant than where state collectors collected, mainly because chiefs had local knowledge about property owners and could better target collection to those more likely to pay.

Researchers are partnering with Lahore Transport Company (LTC), the public vehicle operation regulator, to introduce routes for small vehicles, known as wagons, that feed into a bus rapid transit system and will reserve a portion of wagons for women only. Researchers will evaluate the impact of these investments in public transportation on employment outcomes as well as on women’s empowerment.

In Niger, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of providing training and conditional or unconditional cash transfers on farmers’ adoption and use of an environmental technology, their resulting land use, agricultural production and profitability, and labor allocation. Providing farmers with training led to a substantially higher probability of adopting the technology, while the conditional or unconditional cash transfers had no additional effect on farmers’ decision to adopt.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of reducing the psychological costs of job applications, such as the tendency to postpone applications because completing a task today seems more burdensome than tomorrow, on job application rates and interviews in Lahore, Pakistan. The intervention, which involved follow-up calls inviting job seekers to apply for jobs, increased the number of job applications and interviews. The benefits of applying to jobs were similar after the increase in applications, suggesting that psychological costs play an important role in job search behavior.