Journal articles published externally

2009, Alatas, Vivi, Cameron, Lisa, Chaudhuri, Ananish, Erkal, Nisvan, Gangadharan, Lata

We report results from a corruption experiment with Indonesian public servants and Indonesian students. Our results suggest that the Indonesian public servant subjects have a significantly lower tolerance of corruption than the Indonesian students. We find no evidence that this is due to a selection effect. The reasons given by the subjects for their behaviour suggest that the differences in behavior across the subject pools are driven by their different real life experiences. For example, when abstaining from corruption, public servants more often cite the need to reduce the social costs of corruption as a reason for their actions, and when engaging in corruption, they cite low government salaries or a belief that corruption is a necessary evil in the current environment. In contrast, students give more simplistic moral reasons. We conclude by emphasizing that results obtained from different subject pools can complement each other in illuminating different aspects of the same problem.

2008, Alatas, Vivi, Cameron, Lisa A.

The extensive literature on the employment impact of minimum wages has focused heavily on industrialized nations and very little on the developing world, despite the importance of minimum wages in many low-income countries. One such country, Indonesia, was the setting for an unusual quasi-natural experiment: not only did minimum wages in Indonesia increase sharply between 1990 and 1996, but the resultant increment in average wages varied markedly across different areas in Greater Jakarta. The authors use household-level labor market data to determine the extent of compliance with the legislation, then estimate the employment impact in the clothing, textiles, footwear, and leather industries based on a census of all large and medium-sized establishments. The evidence suggests that there was no negative employment impact for large establishments, either foreign or domestic, but that workers in smaller, domestic establishments may have suffered job losses as a result of minimum wage increases.