With comments by Emily Dyson and Orlando Lazar

With comments by Natalia Brigagão and Kendall Gardner

Governments around the world conduct ethics trainings with public employees to enhance public integrity. Yet, causal evidence on the effectiveness of ethics trainings to enhance integrity in government remains rare. We address this gap through a field experiment with 1,400 police officers in Bangladesh. In collaboration with one Bangladeshi police district, we randomly assign half of the district’s police officers to a state-of-the-art ethics training. Our training trains and primes each participating police officer to be an ethical leader in the police district.

Earmarking taxes for specific expenditure categories is thought to be a crucial factor in the development of the early modern European fiscal states and remains a widespread, yet fiscally rigid and oftentimes inefficient, policy tool. I explore a decidedly political logic to the puzzling prevalence of tax earmarking. In this paper, I test an initial micro-behavioural condition for this political logic of earmarking: that general fund taxation may produce more political mobilization than earmarking would, threatening political survival of governments in low-capacity states.