Status, institutions, and development: Field experiments

The first essay in this dissertation uses a randomized control trial in Sierra Leone to investigate elite capture of community projects. We collaborated with a conservation NGO in 56 rural communities dependent on slash and burn agriculture to vary the conditions under which a participatory development project is managed. In half the villages, the local chief was responsible for the management of the project. In the other half three randomly selected villagers, all heads of their respective household, managed the project. Project management entailed storing supplies, managing work crews and ensuring maintenance of the community construction project. We use several indicators, including engineering audits and household surveys to measure the impact of the project. We find that while there is some evidence that local elites capture project resources, they are also much better managers of participatory projects. We also find evidence that more homogeneous villages with less powerful chiefs benefit more from participatory projects.;In the second essay, we report on a second randomized controlled trial in Sierra Leone. We measure the impact of a transfer program aimed at alleviating poverty and reducing pressure on the natural environment. There is limited micro-level empirical evidence on unintended social impacts of aid and, in particular, the differential social effects of conditional versus unconditional aid. We implement three versions of a transfer program in 91 rural communities dependent on slash and burn agriculture. One version provides aid as a gift to the household, one as a gift to the chief to distribute as he sees fit within the community, and one as an aid-for-work program that makes household transfers conditional on supplying labor. We compare outcomes across a range of social and behavioral indicators, including intertemporal tradeoffs, honesty, social preferences, and civic cohesion. We find no evidence that within village altruism and preferences over honesty are affected by aid. On the other hand giving aid to individuals can reduce conflict in a village and giving aid to the chief for public good provision leads to increased community mobilization. There are surprising negative consequences of making aid conditional---it crowds out personal productivity and participation in public good provision, while raising expectations that unconditional aid is now owed to them.;In the final essay we conduct a lab-in-the-field or artefactual field experiment. Seminal work within experimental economics has shown the remarkable tendency for experimental trading markets to converge to neoclassical predictions. Yet, the extent to which neoclassical competitive market theory explains the equilibrating forces operating in extra-lab markets remains under-researched. In this study, we depart from the traditional experimental investigation of neoclassical competitive theory by using the tools of experimental economics in an actual marketplace. Our laboratory mimics a market in rural Sierra Leone, a region characterized by low levels of market integration and high levels of personalized trade. When participants interact with co-villagers, efficiency levels are much lower than found in the extant literature. By introducing treatments that increase anonymity between traders, we show that social hierarchies play a significant role in dampening efficiency. High-status individuals, when trading with their co-villagers, reduce overall efficiency by paying too much for items traded in the experiment. Upon eliminating status-related concerns, we find that overall efficiency levels approach those found in previous studies.