tion within the the Bolivian Police has already been documented (United Nations Development Program,, 2006). In an interesting nationally representative survey about the bureaucratic services provided by the Police, only 28 percents of citizens agreed that it was possible to successfully complete a bureaucratic process involving the Police without having to incur an extra-legal payment, 47 percent of citizens admitted to have paid at least an extra-legal payment in the last year in order to facilitate the completion of a bureaucratic process, and 30 percent of citizens reported explicitly being asked for a bribe by a police officer in order to complete a process. By eliminating the possibility that police officers might lie about not finding the vital records of an applicant, information technology implicitly adds an accountability mechanism into the renewal process. This accountability mechanism might be successfully operating in this setting to reduce barriers in access to ID cards by explicitly altering the probability of detecting malpractices among police officers.

The third hypothesis consistent with the fact that applicants characteristics are important determinants of renewal outcomes is that excessive bureaucracy or red tape affects applicants differently based on their characteristics. For instance, illiterate applicants might find it harder to navigate the renewal process steps than those applicants with some schooling because they are not able to read the signs at the Unit. This would be further exacerbated by the fact that police officers seem to be quite efficient at identifying relatively disadvantaged applicants so as to search for opportunities to extract bribes. Excess bureaucracy might be intimidating to many people, particularly so to groups socially excluded from the mainstream. It is usually believed that people from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds are less able to access and process information, in part because they have relatively limited education. Endogenous red tape might be introducing an important inequality dimension into the renewal process by requiring some skills from applicants to successfully complete the process. To the extent that these skills are not necessarily uniformly distributed across applicants, this would directly translate into differential renewal outcomes based on the characteristics of the applicants. By allowing applicants to perform all the renewal steps within one physical location, information technology might be significantly facilitating the process for the applicant and, thus, reducing observed gaps in renewal outcomes based on the characteristics of applicants.

Lastly, bureaucratic delay might affect applicants based on their time preferences and, therefore, affect the success rates based on their intrinsic characteristics. For instance, applicants who find bureaucratic delay overwhelming might decide to drop out at some point in the middle of the renewal process and come back at some other point in time to the Identification Unit to start a new renewal process (renewal processes cannot be put on hold — if they are not completed by the end of the day, the applicant needs to start a whole new renewal process). Because of the nature of the data collection, drop-outs are implicitly classified as unsuccessful applicants in the sample. Yet, it is highly unlikely that drop-outs represent a large proportion of unsuccessful applicants. In particular, applicants deciding to drop-out in the middle of the renewal process face transportation expenses and substantial time costs. Because of the marking ink used to mark applicants’ thumbnails at the randomization table, applicants cannot start a new renewal process right away but need to wait for at least a couple of days until the marking ink has faded away. Further, deciding to drop-out in the middle of the renewal process is very costly for the applicant to the extent that queuing time at the license, in India, responding to the needs of private agents. Sequeira and Djankov (2008) find empirical evidence that bureaucrats working in ports within Southern Africa price-discriminate according to characteristics of the shipments and products when setting bribes.

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