Services Timeline Revision RCT

Last registered on November 18, 2022

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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Services Timeline Revision RCT

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0009621

Initial registration date

November 14, 2022

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

November 18, 2022, 12:36 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

India

Region

Punjab

Primary Investigator

Name

Prabhat Barnwal

Affiliation

Michigan State University

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Aaditya Dar

PI Affiliation

Indian School of Business

Contact Investigator

PI Name

Aprajit Mahajan

PI Affiliation

University of California, Berkeley

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2021-01-01

End date

2023-12-31

Keywords

Behavior, Governance, Labor

Additional Keywords

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.

Abstract

Service provision by governments is often delayed in developing countries. On one hand, the government's capacity is constrained by lack of resources. On the other hand, it is often argued that government officers do not perform optimally with given resources. To address these issues, the state government in India. The existing Act mandates bureaucratic officials to deliver the services within a specified duration, a violation of which can incur a penalty. Using a randomized controlled trial, we evaluate an intervention where the time provided by the pre-existing Act to government officials to deliver citizen services is shortened. We measure officials' performance using administrative data and citizen surveys.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Barnwal, Prabhat, Aaditya Dar and Aprajit Mahajan. 2022. "Services Timeline Revision RCT." AEA RCT Registry. November 18. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.9621-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

The government provides many services to citizens, from which we shortlisted high-volume services for our study. Such services include Residence Certificates, Income Certificates, Caste Certificates, Correction in Birth Certificates, etc.
In this intervention, the main treatment is to reduce the mandated timelines for government officials to deliver the services to citizens. Citizen applications in the control group services will continue to operate with the status quo deadlines.

Intervention Start Date

2022-12-01

Intervention End Date

2023-12-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Process Days: the number of business days taken to process citizen applications (administrative data).

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Citizen Satisfaction: We will measure citizen satisfaction using primary surveys.

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Selection of services: We began by selecting top 80 services (by volume of application issued in the time period January-December 2021) as processed in the government’s e-services portal. After deliberations with the government, we then dropped services that were not exclusively processed on the said portal (some could be offline as well). Further we dropped services that had mandated deadlines of less than 5 days. From amongst the new list, we selected the top 36 services (by volume of applications issued in the time period January-December 2021).
Randomization: Our final sample consists of 36 services that are delivered by 6 different government departments. We randomize these services into treatment and control stratified by departments.
Intervention: For a given service in the treatment group, we select the number of days it takes for 75% (or 60%, depending on which one is larger and is less than the designated deadline) of applications to get processed as their official deadline.

Experimental Design Details

Randomization Method

Randomization is done in office using the statistical software package Stata

Randomization Unit

Citizen Services

Was the treatment clustered?

Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

36 services

Sample size: planned number of observations

~650,000 applications (3 month estimate based on monthly average volume of application processed in January-December 2021)

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

18 services control, 18 services treatment

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Process Days (business days): We estimate the power in our design using baseline data from January to December 2021. Considering empirical specifications including controls and clustering the standard errors at the service level, this experiment is sufficiently powered to detect a treatment effect of 1.6 days (mean process days: ~10 days). Delays: We estimate the power in our design using baseline data from January to December 2021. Considering empirical specifications including controls and clustering the standard errors at the service level, this experiment is sufficiently powered to detect a treatment effect of 4% (mean percentage delays: ~14%).

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB