Indonesia

This paper asks whether creating new local districts—government fragmentation—affects local economic activity, using Indonesia’s large wave of district splits from 2000–2014 as a case. The authors exploit variation in the timing of district splits to estimate effects on district GDP and public spending patterns, and they compare outcomes for newly created (“child”) districts and their parents. The study’s central contribution is empirical evidence that fragmentation can reduce measured local GDP in the short run even when central transfers rise.

Paul Kenny, Rashesh Shrestha, and Edward Aspinall investigate how agrarian commodity booms — specifically the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia — reshape local violence and criminality. Understanding these dynamics matters for governance, land policy, policing, and corporate responsibility in regions where extractive agriculture is expanding.

Founding leader personality cults are central to how some states tell stories about themselves and sustain popular loyalty. Paul Schuler, Trung-Anh Nguyen, Yongfeng Tang, and Mohammad Khan examine how these highly visible national narratives originate, asking whether cults always follow from a leader’s personal grab for power or can be intentionally created earlier for collective legitimation.

Taxpayers often hide true income because admitting evasion is socially undesirable, so identifying noncompliance is difficult. This study uses a list experiment to reduce social desirability bias and uncover who is most likely to underreport income on tax returns.