Arman Rezaee

Arman’s research seeks to understand how to improve government services in fragile states, focusing in particular on rural settings, where the majority of the world’s population live and where government services suffer from low employee effort. In his job market paper disseminating evidence from an ATAI study, Arman shows that cost-effective, self-sustaining, and scalable crowd-sourcing technology can be harnessed to improve government performance in Pakistan and subsequently the welfare of rural Pakistanis. Arman is also interested in how personality traits of government employees matter for efforts to improve government services through increased transparency, as well as how governments decide where to offer services in the first place. He uses large-scale field experiments that leverage cellular technology, as well as natural experiments using historical archival data. Much of Arman’s work focuses on Pakistan, though he also has  projects in Uganda and the Philippines.