Voluntary audits: Experimental evidence on a new approach to monitoring front-line bureaucrats q Ana L. De La O a , Lucas I. González b , Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro c,⇑ a Yale University, United States b CONICET-UCA/UNSAM, Argentina c Brown University, United States article info Article history: Accepted 18 October 2022 Available online 2 December 2022 Keywords: Audit agency Bureaucratic oversight Bureaucratic motivation Field Experiment Argentina abstract Can opportunities for undergoing voluntary oversight improve bureaucratic motivation and effort? Drawing on insights from the social sciences, we argue that voluntary oversight increases front-line bureaucrats’ sense of autonomy and competence, and may therefore increase their motivation and effort. Partnering with a provincial auditing body in Argentina, we implement an encouragement design in which school principals are invited to receive a voluntary audit of a publicly funded school meal program. We employ a two-level ran- domization, in which regions are first randomly assigned to a higher or lower rate of invitations, and then schools within regions are randomly assigned to treatment or control. We find divergent effects of treatment based on the density of treatment; in the group of regions assigned to the lower rate of invitations, school prin- cipals assigned to treatment report increased motivation and a decrease in school closings. In contrast, in the group of regions assigned to the higher rate of invitations, we observe the opposite effect. Drawing on qual- itative fieldwork, we speculate that a higher rate of invitations may generate pressure to accept the invitation and thereby undermine any positive effects of volunteering. Our results suggest the promise of voluntary audits as well as the need for further research on the conditions under which voluntary oversight may have differing consequences for bureaucratic effort and motivation. Ó 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Can voluntary forms of oversight improve street-level bureau- crats’ motivation and performance? Poor performance of street- level bureaucrats is a common complaint, especially in lower and middle-income countries where public employees often work with limited resources and for low wages (Dasgupta and Kapur 2020; Pepinsky, Pierskalla, and Sacks 2017; Rauch and Evans 2000). In this paper, we ask whether offering these front-line service providers (FLSPs) the opportunity to volunteer to undergo an audit affects motivation and performance. Drawing on a pre-registered random- ized field experiment among school principals in the province of Chaco, Argentina, we find that voluntary audits improve motivation and performance when few school principals are invited to volun- teer, but they have the opposite effect when many school principals are invited to volunteer. We draw on qualitative fieldwork to inter- pret these results. Our findings suggest that voluntary audits can work in some circumstances, and that examining the collective dynamics of offering street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) a choice is essential for understanding the potential and limits of voluntary oversight. Over the past 30 years, bureaucrats on the front lines of service delivery have ‘‘become a central plank in the global development agenda” (Pepinsky, Pierskalla, and Sacks 2017). 1 The expansion of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106131 0305-750X/Ó 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. q Authors are listed in alphabetical order. Thanks to Don Green, Robert Blair, Matthew S. Winters, Kate Baldwin, Chappell Lawson, Laura Paler, Lily Tsai, Hannah Baron, Jake Bowers, Alexander Coppock, Paul Testa, attendees at seminars and meetings at MIT Gov/Lab, EGAP, IAST, Cornell University, and the University of Illinois, for helpful comments and feedback, as well as Anna Nakai, Catlan Reardon, Cecilia Nuñez Raynoldi, Anna Baker, Zoe Ervolino, Sofia Vidotto, and Nicolas Taccone for excellent research assistance and support and Yi Qi for help with GIS. Brenda Deniz Schneider oversaw the fieldwork and this project would have been impossible without her substantial commitment and contributions. We sincerely thank the Tribunal de Cuentas of the province of Chaco, especially Luis María del Cerro, for their collaboration, as well as Mirta Merlo and her team at the Escuela de Gobierno for their insights into the provincial education system and for carrying out the endline survey. The study’s preregistration at EGAP can be found here: https:// egap.org/registration/5832. This study received an IRB exemption from Brown University (protocol number 1704001741) and Yale University (protocol number 2000021005). Replication files for this study are available in the authors’ websites. ⇑ Corresponding author at Brown University, Providence, RI, USA. E-mail addresses: ana.delao@yale.edu (A.L. De La O), lgonzalez@unsam.edu.ar (L. I. González), rbweitz@brown.edu (R. Weitz-Shapiro). 1 Street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980) are those public-sector employees working at the front lines, providing services to citizens in schools, health centers, and welfare offices. Throughout this paper, we refer interchangeably to ‘‘street-level bureaucrats” (SLBs) and ‘‘frontline service providers” (FLSPs). World Development 162 (2023) 106131 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect World Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev