We examine the impact of ethics and integrity training on police officers in Ghana through a randomized field experiment. The program, informed by theoretical work on the role of identity and motivation in organizations, aimed to re-activate intrinsic motivations to serve the public, and to create a new shared identity of "Agent of Change." Data generated by an endline survey conducted 20 months post training, show that the program positively affected officers' values and beliefs regarding on-the-job unethical behavior and improved their attitudes toward citizens. The training also lowered officers' propensity to behave unethically, as measured by an incentivized cheating game conducted at endline. District-level administrative data for a subsample of districts are consistent with a significant impact of the program on officers' field behavior in the short-run.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Danila Serra is Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford. She is an applied behavioral economist employing experimental methods to address policy-relevant questions in political economy, development, education, and gender economics. Her work has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the World Bank, the IZA G²LM|LIC program, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) and the Arnold Foundation. In 2017, she was the inaugural recipient of the Vernon Smith Ascending Scholar Prize, given by the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE) to an exceptional scholar using experiments in economics research.

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