{"id":13058,"date":"2014-02-21T12:36:46","date_gmt":"2014-02-21T16:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/2014\/02\/21\/information-technologies-and-provision-of-national-identification-cards-by-the-bolivian-police-evidence-from-two-randomized-natural-field-experiments\/"},"modified":"2014-02-21T12:36:46","modified_gmt":"2014-02-21T12:36:46","slug":"information-technologies-and-provision-of-national-identification-cards-by-the-bolivian-police-evidence-from-two-randomized-natural-field-experiments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/2014\/02\/21\/information-technologies-and-provision-of-national-identification-cards-by-the-bolivian-police-evidence-from-two-randomized-natural-field-experiments\/","title":{"rendered":"Information technologies and provision of national identification cards by the Bolivian Police: Evidence from two randomized natural field experiments"},"content":{"rendered":"

ABSTRACT:<\/p>\n

This paper investigates the potential of information technologies to improve public service delivery and empower\u00a0citizens in the context of two unusual randomized natural experiments occurring within one particular bureaucratic\u00a0process: the renewal of a national identication card by the Bolivian Police. The rst experiment arises from the\u00a0random assignment of both police ocers and applicants to a manual or digital renewal process, which is identical in\u00a0all aspects except that the digital renewal process makes use of information technologies as part of the renewal process.
\nThe second experiment arises by the existence of technical failures within the digital renewal process, which allows\u00a0police ocers to change from the digital to the manual renewal process randomly across renewal day. The eciency of\u00a0public service delivery is measured in terms of both renewal success rates (which average to a strikingly low rate of 72\u00a0percent in our sample) and time-it-takes to renew an identication card. The causal eect of information technologies\u00a0on public service delivery is estimated using two dierent identication strategies. In the rst one, applicant-police\u00a0ocer pairs randomly assigned to each one of these two renewal processes are compared after controlling for renewal\u00a0day xed eects. In the second one, applicant-police ocer pairs randomly assigned to the digital process are compared\u00a0to those randomly assigned to this same process but who experienced a technical failure within the process, which\u00a0allows to directly control for unobserved heterogeneity at the police ocer level. We nd that information technologies\u00a0signicantly improve the quality of public service delivery.<\/p>\n

Applicants randomly assigned to the digital renewal process\u00a0are on average 12 percentage points more likely to complete the renewal process as compared to those randomly\u00a0assigned to the manual one. Further, successful applicants randomly assigned to the digital process take on average\u00a031 percent less time to complete the process as compared to those randomly assigned to the manual one. Lastly, we\u00a0nd that information technologies signicantly lower barriers in access to national identication cards by promoting\u00a0a more equitable provision across the population. We discuss several channels through which technologies might be\u00a0improving eciency and promoting equity within this particular bureaucratic process. Overall, our ndings suggest\u00a0that information technologies might be achieving these goals by introducing eciencies (such as reducing administrative\u00a0shortcomings and transaction costs), and limiting the exercise of discretion by police ocers within the renewal process.<\/p>\n

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Working Paper N\u00b0 02\/2014<\/a><\/h3>\n
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ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the potential of information technologies to improve public service delivery and empower\u00a0citizens in the context of two unusual randomized natural experiments occurring within one particular bureaucratic\u00a0process: the renewal of a national identication card by the Bolivian Police. The rst experiment arises from the\u00a0random assignment of both police ocers and applicants to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[253,521,443,125,45,432],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","","category-economia-para-el-bienestar","category-economics-of-wellbeing","category-alberto-chong-2","category-alberto-chong","category-documentos","category-working-papers"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wqBX-3oC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inesad.edu.bo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}