Stanford University

Adeline (Pinyu) Liao

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CDDRL Honors Student, 2026-27
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Adeline (Pinyu) Liao is an undergraduate researcher at Stanford University studying Computer Science (Computational Biology) with a minor in Economics. Her work sits at the intersection of global health, political economy, and institutional infrastructure that shape access to medicines in emerging markets.

Liao is the founder and CEO of Niora Systems, a pharmaceutical procurement and financial infrastructure company working to address drug stockouts in low- and middle-income countries. Through partnerships with leading Ghanaian hospitals, including Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital and Trust Hospital, she is building systems that stabilize procurement markets by improving contract enforcement, payment reliability, and supply chain coordination.

At Stanford, Liao conducts interdisciplinary research spanning political economy, health systems, and computational biology. She is a student researcher under the mentorship of Dr. Karen Eggleston at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Nobel Laureate Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi. Previously, Liao conducted research in proteomics and chemical biology under Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi (Stanford), Dr. Martin Welch (University of Cambridge), and Dr. Susan Hagen (Harvard Medical School), contributing to work on LYTAC technology and cell surface proteomics. She has co-authored research published in Cell and has presented computational biology research internationally. Her early research received multiple distinctions, including Second Place Grand Award at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) and selection to the MIT Research Science Institute (RSI).

Beyond her scientific research, Liao has pursued science communication and public scholarship. She founded Lavender + Lab Coats, a global science writing platform that reached more than 80,000 monthly readers across over 130 countries. Her documentary, The Quest to Stop Antibiotic Resistance, was screened by the World Health Organization and recognized at multiple international film festivals. She has spoken on topics including antibiotic resistance and global health, and was the youngest speaker at TEDxStanford 2024.

Her academic and entrepreneurial work is driven by a central question: how markets and institutions can be redesigned to ensure that essential medicines reliably reach patients. Through both research and entrepreneurship, she focuses on developing infrastructure that underpins functional markets, including procurement systems, logistics networks, and financial coordination mechanisms that enable healthcare systems to operate reliably at scale.

Liao was born in Taiwan and raised across the United States and Taiwan. Outside of her work, she is interested in historical architecture and medical history and hopes one day to restore historic medical buildings around the world.

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Impacts of Ethics Training on Police Officers in Ghana

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Soraya Johnson
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Public sectors that are plagued by corruption and poor performance hinder the development of low-income countries. Populations globally tend to perceive the police as the most corrupt sector of government, partly due to their frequent interactions with citizens. Only once corruption is reduced can trust in institutions be restored, enabling the development of countries.

Therefore, Associate Professor Danila Serra at Texas A&M University and her collaborators decided to investigate whether a training program could incentivize traffic officers to behave more ethically. Their study, presented by Serra at a recent CDDRL seminar, was conducted in Ghana, where almost 60% of people perceive the police as corrupt. 

The program, titled “Proud to Belong,” focused on creating a new group identity of officers as ‘agents of change.' It also prompted the officers to focus on their original reasons for joining the police, rebuilding their intrinsic motivations to ultimately reduce their participation in corruption. The training was implemented through a randomized control trial in randomly selected traffic police districts in the Greater Accra Region. 

The researchers first measured the program’s effectiveness through an incentivized cheating game played by officers both prior to the training and 20 months afterward. The study found a significant reduction in the unethical behavior of officers playing the game, indicating that the program successfully strengthened their values.

To understand whether these impacts extend to field behavior, Serra and her team measured police field activity in the months before and after the program’s implementation. They analyzed administrative data such as the number of drivers sent to court, those required to pay a fine, and the fine amounts. The team hypothesized that if bribes were acting as substitutes for formal law enforcement, an increase in field activity would indicate a decline in officer corruption.

This data demonstrated that the program had a significant positive impact on officer behavior, but only during the first 3 months post-training. To reconcile the limits of this short-term impact with the long-term benefits implied by the cheating game, researchers determined that this may be because of the need for reinforcements following the program. For example, an award ceremony honoring the officers’ participation in the program, 9 months post-training, revived the positive impact on field behavior. Evidence also suggests that, 20 months after the training, low-rank officers in treatment districts were less likely to have been promoted, hinting at structural problems preventing the end of corruption.

The program designed by Serra and her collaborators demonstrates that it is possible to encourage more ethical behavior among bureaucrats through targeted training, offering a promising tool for reducing corruption. However, sustained training, ongoing reinforcement, and support from higher-ranking officers are necessary to maintain these behavioral changes and ensure lasting impact.

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“No Peace in Sight:” Ideology, Territory, and the Stalemate in the Russo-Ukraine War

In a recent REDS Seminar, Syracuse University Professor of Political Science Brian Taylor examined the state of the war, the prospects for peace, and the political dynamics shaping both Ukrainian resistance and Russian aggression.
“No Peace in Sight:” Ideology, Territory, and the Stalemate in the Russo-Ukraine War
CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow Ivetta Sergeeva presented her research in a CDDRL seminar on April 24, 2025.
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How Transnational Repression Impacts Exiled Opposition

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow Ivetta Sergeeva’s research on the Russian diaspora’s willingness to donate to oppositional organizations demonstrates that the criminalization of groups can incentivize greater donor support among emigrants, contrary to the Putin regime’s intentions.
How Transnational Repression Impacts Exiled Opposition
Soledad Artiz Prillaman presented her research in a CDDRL seminar on April 10, 2025.
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Does Electoral Affirmative Action Worsen Candidate Quality?

In the wake of widespread challenges to affirmative action policy, Stanford Political Scientist Soledad Artiz Prillaman’s research challenges the notion that electoral quotas for minority representation weaken candidate quality.
Does Electoral Affirmative Action Worsen Candidate Quality?
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Danila Serra presented her research in a CDDRL seminar on May 8, 2025.
Danila Serra presented her research in a CDDRL seminar on May 8, 2025.
Soraya Johnson
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Associate Professor at Texas A&M University Danila Serra’s field research on the impacts of police ethics training provides hope for reducing corruption and restoring public faith in state institutions.

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When no bad deed goes punished: Relational contracting in Ghana and the UK

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Experiment evidence to date indicates that subjects follow a trigger strategy in finitely repeated games: they punish bad contractual performance by reducing future offers and the threat of punishment disciplines opportunistic breach. This behavior contradicts standard game theory predictions. We conduct a repeated prisoner's dilemma (PD) game experiment with university students in Ghana and the UK. The experiment is framed as an employment contract. Each period the employer makes a irrevocable wage offer to the worker who then chooses an effort level. UK subjects use a trigger strategy to discipline workers, in line with previous experiments: wage offers reward high effort and punish low effort in the past; this induces workers to choose high effort; and gains from trade are shared between workers and employers. We find no such evidence with Ghana subjects: employers seldom reduce wage offers after low effort and, if they do, workers respond by lowering effort; employer often reduce wages after high effort; and employers earn a zero payoff on average. Introducing competition or reputation does not significantly improve workers’ effort. We conclude that the use of trigger strategies in repeated labor transactions is not a universally shared heuristic.

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Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
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Marcel Fafchamps
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Pages 714-737

The evolution of built-up areas in Ghana since 1975

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We use high resolution satellite data on the proportion of buildings in a 250x250 meter cell to study the evolution of human settlement in Ghana over a 40 year period. We find a strong increase in built-up area over time, mostly concentrated in the vicinity of roads, and also directly on the coast. We find strong evidence of agglomeration effects both in the static sense—buildup in one cell predicts buildup in a nearby cell—and in a dynamic sense—buildup in a cell predicts buildup in that cell later on and an increase in buildup in nearby cells. These effects are strongest over a 3 to 15 Km radius, which corresponds to a natural hinterland for a population without mechanized transportation. We find no evidence that human settlements are spaced more or less equally either over the landscape or along roads. This suggests that arable land is not yet fully utilized, allowing rural settlements to be separated by areas of un-farmed land. By fitting a transition matrix to the data, we predict a sharp increase in the proportion of the country that is densely built-up by the middle and the end of the century, but no increase in the proportion of partially built-up locations.

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PLoS one
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Marcel Fafchamps
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5

Do Fair Elections Increase the Responsiveness of Politicians?

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I leverage novel experimental designs and 2, 160 months of Members of Parliaments’ (MPs’) Constituency Development Fund spending to test whether fair elections promote democratic responsiveness. I nd that MPs elected in constituencies that were randomly assigned to high levels of election monitoring dur- ing Ghana’s 2012 polls spend 19 percentage points more of their CDFs, on average, compared to those who were elected from districts that had fewer monitors. These legislators were equally absent from parliamentary meetings as their low-monitoring counterparts elected during their terms in o ce, which suggests that fair elections do not motivate politicians to substitute constituency service for parliamen- tary work. The results imply that higher-integrity elections incentivize incumbents to exert more e fort to satisfy citizens’ demand for constituency service. Regarding mechanisms, I provide tentative causal evidence that politicians substitute e fort for fraud when they expect that similar intense future election monitoring will limit their ability to rig their reelection and enable voters to sanction poor performance. The paper demonstrates the downstream e fect of election monitoring on elite behavior and provides causal evidence of the impact of election quality on democratic accountability. 

 

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CDDRL honors student recognized for outstanding thesis

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law congratulates Belinda Tang for being awarded the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize for her original research on the implementation of female quota systems in electoral districts in Lesotho. Her honors thesis entitled, "Gender, Policy-making, and Politics: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in Lesotho," explored mandated quotas for female representation in electoral districts, combining intensive fieldwork and sophisticated econometric analysis. Tang’s research was conducted under the consultation of Jeremy Weinstein, FSI senior fellow, and Pascaline Dupas, associate professor of economics.

Belinda Tang won the David M. Kennedy Prize for her thesis work on female quota systems in local governments in Lesotho.
Photo Credit: Alice Kada

Designed to address the issue of under-representation of women in local electoral districts in Lesotho - female quota systems- Tang concluded, actually decreased female favorability compared to those females who were freely elected into local seats. Tang also found that females experienced bargaining disadvantages compared to males in achieving local infrastructure projects, such as roads.

Four undergraduate Stanford students are awarded the Kennedy Prize each year for their outstanding honors theses in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and the applied sciences. Tang was recognized for her advanced and extensive research approach as well as her strong initiative in gathering and collecting data, despite several setbacks in Lesotho. After graduating this June in the department of economics, she will be working as a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research.

Tang is part of a cohort of eight graduating CDDRL senior honors students who were recognized for their original and outstanding theses during a recent luncheon. Many past research projects have been published in distinguished journals and have informed policy on national and international levels, receiving wide recognition. Danna Seligman received the “Best Thesis Award” for her exemplary and original research on America’s political polarization entitled, “The Origins of Political Gridlock in the United States: Modeling Institutional Gridlock as Moral Hazard in the United States Congress.”

CDDRL recognized Danna Seligman with the "Best Thesis Award" under the CDDRL Senior Honors Program for her original work on the origins of policial gridlock in the United States Congress. She is seen here with Francis Fukuyama, advisor to the Senior Honors Program, and CDDRL Director Larry Diamond.
Photo Credit: Alice Kada

The CDDRL Undergraduate Senior Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. Honors students participate in research methods workshops, attend honors college in Washington, D.C., connect to the CDDRL research community, and write their thesis in close consultation with a faculty advisor to graduate with a certificate of honors in democracy, development, and the rule of law. The program is advised under the leadership of Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow Francis Fukuyama.

Over the course of the year-long program, students worked in consultation with CDDRL affiliated faculty members and attended honors research workshops to develop their thesis project. Many traveled abroad to collect data, conduct interviews, and to spend time in the country they were researching. Collectively, their topics documented some of the most pressing issues impacting democracy today in sub-Saharan Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Pakistan, Lesotho, Ghana, and Nepal, among others.  

A list of the 2014 graduating class of CDDRL Undergraduate Honors students, their theses advisors, and a link to their theses can be found here:

 

Meaghan Conway

 

Science, Technology & Society

Blended Return on Investment (ROI)?: Analyzing the Economic and Social Returns of Private Equity Investment in sub-Saharan African Electricity Utilities

Advisors: Francis Fukuyama and William Meehan III

Mahilini Kailaiyangirichelvam

 

International Relations

The Prolonged Threat to Food Production: The Impact of the Civil War on Food Production in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka 

Advisor: Rosamond Naylor

Haiy Le

 

International Relations

Framing the Discourse: State Media and Social Media in Vietnam

Advisor: Larry Diamond

Devanshi Patel

 

International Relations

Education or Prosecution: Institutional Efforts to Combat Sexual Violence in the United States Military

Advisor: Francis Fukuyama

Janani Ramachandran

 

International Relations

Determinants of Anti-Americanism in Pakistan

Advisor: Francis Fukuyama

Danna Seligman

 

Political Science

The Origins of Political Gridlock in the United States: Modeling Institutional Gridlock as Moral Hazard in the United States Congress

Advisors: Gary Cox and Francis Fukuyama

Belinda Tang

 

Economics

Gender, Policy-making, and Politics: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in Lesotho 

Advisors: Pascaline Dupas and Jeremy Weinstein

Aditya Todi

 

International Relations

Democratizing Parties: Intra-Party Democracy in Political Parties in Ghana and Nepal

Advisor: Larry Diamond
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Belinda
Belinda Tang won the David M. Kennedy Prize for her thesis work on female quota systems in local government in Lesotho.
Alice Kada
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The Geography of Governance: Evidence from Slums, Satellites and Foreign Aid

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Abstract:

It is almost too obvious to state, but access to public services and the nature of governance varies hugely within countries, regions and cities. Nevertheless, most work on the “quality of government”, rule of law, corruption, etc. focuses on between-country comparisons. After providing some evidence that within-country variation belies any notion of a national “quality of government”, I lay out a framework for explaining why outcomes vary so much across localities within countries. I explore the usefulness of the framework by providing evidence from three ongoing projects. The first relies on surveys designed to examine the role of slum-level social and political networks in conditioning access to basic public services in Udaipur, India. The second project relies on four post-civil war settings to understand why authorities target some localities with electrification projects but not others.  The third project involves a field experiment embedded in an aid program that compares alternative means of improving accountability in Ghana’s district governments. I will conclude with some reflections on the costs and benefits of working with donors on governance programming.

Speaker Bio: 

Erik Wibbels is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. His research focuses on development, decentralized governance and other areas of political economy. He has also spent considerable time working with USAID's Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance in an effort to improve the quality of aid programs aimed at decentralized governance and service provision.

 

 

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Erik Wibbels Associate Professor of Political Science Speaker Duke University
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Election Observers and Electoral Quality: The (Sometimes Unintended) Effects of Election Observation

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Election observation is central to democracy promotion efforts around the world, yet relatively little is known about observers' effects on electoral quality.  Do election observers deter electoral fraud, violence, and voter intimidation? Or do political parties strategically respond to the presence of observers, thereby negating their impact?  This project leverages the random assignment of 1,000 election observers to polling stations during Ghana's 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections to address these questions.  We show that observers significantly reduce indicators of fraud at the polling stations to which they are deployed. We also find, however, that political parties successfully relocate fraud from observed to unobserved stations in their historical strongholds, where they enjoy social penetration and political competition is low, whereas they are not able to do so in politically competitive constituencies.  The presentation will also report preliminary results from a household survey conducted after the elections designed to measure observers’ effects on patterns of electoral violence and voter intimidation.  The findings have implications for understanding political party behavior and the complex effects of governance interventions.

 

Speaker Bio:

Eric Kramon received his PhD in political science from UCLA in 2013 and is a 2013-14 Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow.  He will be an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University starting in Summer 2014.  While at CDDRL, he is working on a book project on vote buying and clientelism in Africa, as well as additional projects on the impact of election observation on electoral fraud and electoral quality, ethnicity and the politics of public goods provision in Africa, and the political determinants of good governance reforms.

 

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Eric Kramon

Encina Hall, C139
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow 2013-2014, CDDRL Pre-doctoral Fellow 2011-2013
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Eric Kramon received his PhD in political science from UCLA in 2013 and is a 2013-14 Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow.  He will be an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University starting in Summer 2014.  While at CDDRL, he is working on a book project on vote buying and clientelism in Africa, as well as additional projects on the impact of election observation on electoral fraud and electoral quality, ethnicity and the politics of public goods provision in Africa, and the political determinants of good governance reforms.

Eric Kramon Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
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Marcel Fafchamps

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Economics
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Marcel Fafchamps is a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Previously, he was the Satre Family Senior Fellow at FSI. Fafchamps is a professor (by courtesy) for the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His research interests include economic development, market institutions, social networks, and behavioral economics — with a special focus on Africa and South Asia.

Prior to joining FSI, from 1999-2013, Fafchamps served as professor of development economics in the Department of Economics at Oxford University. He also served as deputy director and then co-director of the Center for the Study of African Economies. From 1989 to 1996, Fafchamps was an assistant professor with the Food Research Institute at Stanford University. Following the closure of the Institute, he taught for two years at the Department of Economics. For the 1998-1999 academic year, Fafchamps was on sabbatical leave at the research department of the World Bank. Before pursuing his PhD in 1986, Fafchamps was based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for 5 years during his employment with the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency that oversees employment, income distribution, and vocational training in Africa.

He has authored two books: Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Theory and Evidence (MIT Press, 2004) and Rural Poverty, Risk, and Development (Elgar Press, 2003), and has published numerous articles in academic journals.

Fafchamps served as the editor-in-chief of Economic Development and Cultural Change until 2020. Previously, he had served as chief editor of the Journal of African Economies from 2000 to 2013, and as associate editor of the Economic Journal, the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and the Revue d'Economie du Développement.

He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an affiliated professor with J-PAL, a senior fellow with the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a research fellow with IZA, Germany, and with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, UK, and an affiliate with the University of California’s Center for Effective Global Action.

Fafchamps has degrees in Law and in Economics from the Université Catholique de Louvain. He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. 

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Designing and Deploying Mobile Technologies for Social Impact: Lessons Learned from Designing for Urban Sex Workers in India and Young Internet Users in Ghana

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*** Change of Speaker***

Abstract
The global spread of mobile phones has led to several technology explorations for social impact. How can we design human-centered solutions for socio-economic development that are locally relevant and meaningful, ensuring they get used and have impact? In this talk, I will present two research studies from designing and deploying technologies for social impact in India and Ghana. In the first half, I will discuss how we designed and deployed a phone audio broadcasting system for microfinance and health reminders for a urban sex worker community in India (work with Microsoft Research India). I'll discuss how we built trust, protected privacy, built design principles based on our ethnographic research, and share our lessons learned from designing and evaluating the system for a hard-to-reach user group.
 
In the second half, I will discuss the design and evaluation of a mobile Internet tool to make data usage information transparent, called SmartBrowse (work with Google.org). In emerging economies, mobile data is on the rise, but is particularly expensive. I'll share our design journey from creating mobile data transparency concepts to deploying and evaluating the tool with 300 Android users for 10 weeks in a university in Ghana, including findings such as how SmartBrowse led to a significant reduction in Internet credit spend and increased online activity, and lessons learned from running a large-scale trial.
 
 
Nithya Sambasivan is a User Experience Researcher at Google.org, where she researches technologies for social impact. Nithya has a Ph.D in Informatics from University of California, Irvine; her dissertation focussed on researching and designing human-centered technologies for socio-economic development among slum communities, sex workers and microenterprises. She also has a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from Georgia Institute of Technology and has interned at Microsoft Research India, IBM Watson Research and Nokia Research Center. 


 

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Nithya Sambasivan User Experience Researcher Speaker Google. org.
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