Asim Ijaz Khwaja

Asim Ijaz Khwaja

Visiting Professor of Business Administration

Asim Ijaz Khwaja is the Director of the Center for International Development and the Sumitomo-Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development Professor of International Finance and Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP). His areas of interest include economic development, finance, education, political economy, institutions, and contract theory/mechanism design. His research combines extensive fieldwork, rigorous empirical analysis, and microeconomic theory to answer questions that are motivated by and engage with policy.

He has been published in leading economics journals, such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has received coverage in numerous media outlets, such as The Economist, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, Al-Jazeera, BBC, and CNN.

His recent work ranges from understanding market failures in emerging financial markets to examining the private education market in low-income countries. He was selected as a Carnegie Scholar in 2009 to pursue research on how religious institutions impact individual beliefs.

Khwaja received BS degrees in economics and in mathematics with computer science from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard. He was born in London, U.K. and lived in Kano, Nigeria and Lahore, Pakistan before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He continues to enjoy interacting with people around the globe.

Khwaja also serves as the faculty co-chair of a week-long executive education program, "Rethinking Financial Inclusion: Smart Design for Policy and Practice," aimed primarily at professionals involved in the design and regulation of financial products and services for low-income populations.

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Article | Journal of Political Economy | Forthcoming

Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan

Daron Acemoglu, Ali Cheema, Asim I. Khwaja and James A. Robinson

Lack of trust in state institutions is a pervasive problem in many developing countries. This paper investigates whether information about improved public services can help build trust in state institutions and move people away from non-state actors. We find that (truthful) information about reduced delays in state courts in rural Pakistan leads to citizens reporting higher likelihood of using them and to greater allocations to the state in two high-stakes lab games. More interestingly, we find negative indirect effects on non-state actors and show that these effects are mediated by changes in beliefs. Our preferred interpretation explains these behaviors as a response to improved beliefs about state actors that then make individuals interact less with non-state actors and as a result downgrade their beliefs about them.

Keywords: dispute resolution; lab-in-the-field games; legitimacy; motivated reasoning; non-state actors; state capacity; Trust; Conflict and Resolution; Information; Developing Countries and Economies;

Citation:

Acemoglu, Daron, Ali Cheema, Asim I. Khwaja, and James A. Robinson. "Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan." Journal of Political Economy (forthcoming). View Details

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Bureaucracies often post staff to better or worse locations, ostensibly to provide incentives. Yet we know little about whether this works, with heterogeneity in preferences over postings impacting effectiveness. We propose a performance-ranked serial dictatorship mechanism, whereby bureaucrats sequentially choose desired locations in order of performance. We evaluate this using a two-year field experiment with 525 property tax inspectors in Pakistan. The mechanism increases annual tax revenue growth by 30–41 percent. Inspectors whom our model predicts face high equilibrium incentives under the scheme indeed increase performance more. Our results highlight the potential of periodic merit-based postings in enhancing bureaucratic performance.

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