As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Stéphane Straub, Professor of Economics at Toulouse School of Economics.

He will present his work, joint with Jonas Gathen and Vitalijs Jascisens, titled Decentralization in Indonesia and Local Outcomes: Estimating Spending Efficiency.

Abstract: We analyze Indonesia’s big-bang decentralization, which in the early 2000s translated into massive transfers of resources to local districts. Using the non-linearity of the allocation rule to circumvent the potential endogeneity that arises when regressing local outcomes on district revenues, we start by answering two questions. First, how does the level and composition of local government spending respond to additional revenues? Second, given this spending response, what is the impact on development outcomes of households and firms? Next, we use these results to perform structural estimates of the efficiency of spending across three categories of outcomes, namely infrastructure, health, and education, and evaluate its district-level determinants.

About the speaker

Stéphane Straub is a Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics and the head of its development lab Arqade. His work revolves around the impact of physical and institutional infrastructure issues on the process of economic development. He is also secretary of the Jean-Jacques Laffont association, a charitable organisation, created after his death by his wife Colette to provide scholarships to deserving students from developing and transition countries studying at the University of Toulouse.