Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India

By K. Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, Sandip Sukhtankar. 2016

481 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b249b4250f554d9d341771716182d5d4117b54fb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Esther Duflo
2. Paul J. Gertler
3. Dina Pomeranz
4. P. Bardhan
5. Benjamin Pasquale
6. V. Murinde
7. Enrique Seira
8. Vanesa Pesqué-Cela

In Finance

1. Benjamin Pasquale
2. V. Murinde
3. Dina Pomeranz
4. Vanesa Pesqué-Cela
5. Yener Altunbaş
6. Ayşegül Demir
7. A. Lupu
8. Esther Duflo

In Gender Studies

1. P. Bardhan
2. Benjamin Pasquale
3. Dina Pomeranz
4. K. Orkin
5. A. Lupu
6. Esther Duflo
7. Paul J. Gertler
8. Clément A. C. Imbert

Citations in the corpus

• The Economist as Plumber (2017, background): “Of course, to generalize the finding beyond Andhra Pradesh, or beyond this 7 Muralidharan and Niehaus (2016) make the same argument in their discussion of experimentation at scale. particular improvement, we would only need to be willing to assume that other reasons for intensive margin increase in…”
• Banking on Trust: How Debit Cards Enable the Poor to Save More (2017, background): “…and South Africa, in which cash transfers are also paid through bank or mobile money accounts and recipients generally withdraw the entire transfer amount in one lump sum withdrawal each pay period (Bold, Porteous, and Rotman, 2012; Aker et al., 2016; Muralidharan, Niehaus, and Sukhtankar, 2016).”
• ACHIEVING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (2016, background): “• In India, digitizing government transfers reduced bribe demands for receiving the payment by 47 percent, and increased payments received by beneficiaries by removing middlemen who skimmed off funds (Muralidharan et al. 2014).”
• Social protection response to the COVID-19 crisis: options for developing countries (2020, background): “Direct beneficiary payments, and transparency in how much is given to whom, may help keep ‘fund leakages’ under control (Muralidharan et al., 2016; Banerjee et al., 2016).”
• State and Development: The Need for a Reappraisal of the Current Literature† (2016, background): “Muralidharan et al (2014) evaluate the impact of a biometrically-authenticated payments infrastructure on public 19 See Bardhan (2005), Chapter 1.”
• Why Do Defaults Affect Behavior? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan (2018, unknown): “…salaries via mobile money is now happening in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America (cf. Karlan et al. 2016a; Aker et al. 2016; Breza, Kanz, and Klapper 2017); phone-based and electronic welfare payments are also becoming increasingly common (Muralidharan, Niehaus, and Sukhtankar 2016).”
• Can Technology Solve the Principal-Agent Problem? Evidence from China’s War on Air Pollution (2020, unknown): “While an extensive literature exists on the impacts of technology adoption on economic development, only a few of them have investigated how information and monitoring technology affect public sector governance and efficiency (e.g., Orphanides 2001; Duflo et al., 2012; Muralidharan et al., 2016).”
• Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Development: Evidence from India (2016, methodology): “NREGS uses these two modes send direct payments to workers (Muralidharan, Niehaus, and Sukhtankar 2016).”
• Reducing bureaucratic corruption: Interdisciplinary perspectives on what works (2018, unknown): “In a large-scale randomized control trial involving nearly 19 million people, Muralidharan et al. (2016) show that introducing biometric smart cards in India substantially decreased embezzlement of government transfers.”
• Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India (2016, unknown): “6Examples for other sectors include the use of mobile telephones to circumvent the lack of formal banking systems (Jack and Suri 2014), the use of electronic voting machines for better enfranchisement of illiterate citizens in democracies (Fujiwara 2015) and the use of biometric authentication to ci”
• Fintech, financial inclusion and income inequality: a quantile regression approach (2020, background): “Evidence from Niger and India shows that digitising government payments reduces administrative costs and corruption, leaving more resources available for social spending (Aker et al. 2011; Muralidharan, Niehaus, and Sukhtankar 2014).”
• Dodging the Taxman: Firm Misreporting and Limits to Tax Enforcement (2017, result): “Our results also add to a very limited empirical literature examining the role of technology in improving developing country public sector performance (see, e.g., Lewis-Faupel et al., 2014; Muralidharan et al., 2014).”