Chief for a Day: Elite Capture and Management Performance in a Field Experiment in Sierra Leone
在塞拉利昂的实地实验中，通过改变发展项目委员会成员（地方精英或随机村民），研究管理者身份对寻租和项目绩效的影响，发现精英并未俘获资源，但管理更有效。
We use a field experiment in Sierra Leone to examine how the identity of the manager influences rent seeking and performance in participatory development projects. Specifically, we vary the composition of a committee responsible for implementing a development project—local elites or randomly selected villagers. The design is unique in that it permits us to explore the effectiveness of two alternative local governance modalities and the extent of elite capture in community projects. We find little evidence that local elites capture project resources. We do observe they are better managers of development projects. Improved performance covaries with a proxy for power of the local chief. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2866 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics.