to the welfare of vulnerable villagers, but which are directly under the control of the behavior of village leaders. Importantly, as the responsibility for distributing food aid is not specifically assigned to elected councils, elected councils are not expected to have developed specialized expertise in managing food aid distributions. Importantly, this provides the study with the ability to identify the effect of elected councils on the behavioral incentives facing different groups of local leaders, rather than inadvertently capturing the effect of capacities or skills imparted to individual leaders by NSP.

# **III. Research Design**

# _III.1 - Sample and Randomization of NSP_

Variation in elected councils is provided by the randomized impact evaluation of NSP, which is a multi-year study designed to assess the effects of the program on a broad range of economic, institutional, and social indicators. Ten large districts with no prior NSP activity and satisfactory security conditions were selected for inclusion in the evaluation. The districts cover all major regions of Afghanistan except the south, which could not be included due to adverse security conditions (see Figure 1). The sample is also representative of Afghanistan’s ethno-linguistic diversity, with five predominantly Tajik districts, four predominantly Pashtun districts, one predominantly Hazara district, and two districts with substantial Uzbek and Turkmen minorities.<sup>4</sup> In each of the ten sample districts, NSP facilitating partners selected 50 villages for inclusion in the study, which were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups of equal size. To improve statistical balance, a four-stage matched-pair cluster randomization procedure was applied:

1. <u>Village Clusters: To minimize spillovers between treated and untreated units, villages located</u> within 1 kilometer were grouped in clusters. Of the 500 villages, 107 were assigned to 41 clusters. The number of villages in each cluster ranged from two to six.

2. <u>Matched Pairs: In each district, the 50 villages were divided into 25 pairs using an optimal greedy</u> matching algorithm (King et. al. 2007), which matched villages on background characteristics provided that the villages were not in the same cluster.<sup>5</sup> 3. <u>Assignment of Treatment: In each matched pair, one village was randomly assigned to receive</u> the program, such that the clusters of villages were assigned the same treatment status.

4. <u>Violations of Clustering Restrictions: In a few districts, the large number of clustered villages</u> precluded the co-assignment of clustered villages to the same treatment status. For cases for which co-assignment without violation of clustering restrictions was not possible, the number of violations was minimized through simulation.

Villages in the treatment group received NSP and elected councils following the administration of a baseline survey in September 2007, with the remaining 250 control villages not receiving NSP or elected councils until spring 2012, at which point all data collection activities for the study were concluded.

In addition to the variation in the existence of councils, we also introduce variation in the procedures of the food aid distribution (see Section III.3 below).

# _III.2 - Wheat Distribution and Data Collection_

To identify the effects of elected councils on local governance, we organized a food aid distribution across the sample of 500 villages between June and October 2011, approximately three-and-a-half years after

> 4 An assessment of the demographic and economic characteristics of the 500 villages reveal few substantive differences with those of a random sample of villages surveyed by the 2007-08 National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment.

> 5 The background characteristics included village size (based on data collected a few years earlier by Afghanistan’s Central Statistics Organization) and a set of geographic variables (distance to river, distance to major road, altitude, and average slope).

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