Making Moves Matter: Experimental Evidence on Incentivizing Bureaucrats through Performance-Based Postings

Abstract

This paper was accepted to the AER under the guidance of Stefano DellaVigna, Coeditor. This project is the result of collaboration among many people. We thank Robert Gibbons, Parag Pathak, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments. We thank

Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness

“…firms) (i) engaged in different activities and/or (ii) based on wages and profits. 10 In this sense our paper is most closely related to recent work by Khan et al (2016Khan et al ( , 2018 analyzing how the incentives of bureaucrats matter for tax revenue in Pakistan (see also Bertrand et al (2016) on how bureaucrat incentives matter for perceived performance and aggregate outcomes in India), and to the lit- 7 The WTO's Government Procurement Agreement seeks to restrict countries' ability to use procurement in this way. However, the agreement has only 10 signatories to date, presumably due to the appeal of favoring local bidders in procurement.…”

“…First, a growing body of research has documented dramatic differences in abilities and practices across individual public sector workers and across the organizations they work for (see e.g. Bloom et al , 2015;Finan et al , 2017;Khan et al , 2016Khan et al , , 2018. What remains unclear is the extent to which such differences influence public sector output, and how this varies with the policies in use (for evidence that front-line public sector workers such as teachers and health and community workers do, at least to some extent, influence public sector output, see the excellent overview of the literature by Finan et al (2017)).…”

The Economist as Plumber

“…find that the promise of a transfer out of a punishment posting induced police officers to work harder on conducting random sobriety check points. Khan et al (2016a) propose, implement, and test one particular system -performance-ranked serial dictatorship -in which tax inspectors select their most favored location in an order that is determined by performance. The authors show that the mechanism does in fact work, increasing tax collection by 40% to 80%.…”

“…For other examples of complex plumbing experiments with many treatments that look specifically at mechanisms, seeOlken (2007);Alatas et al (2012Alatas et al ( , 2016;Khan et al (2016a); …”

Essays on State Effectiveness: Information, Tax Collection and Hierarchies

“…Do Research Findings Influence Policy? Experimental Evidence from Brazilian Municipalities 18 ming;Nath, 2015;Khan et al, 2016Khan et al, , 2018Best et al, 2017;Bertrand et al, 2018;Rasul and Rogger, 2018) and leaders' identities (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004;Jones and Olken, 2005;Besley et al, 2011;Beaman et al, 2012;Martinez-Bravo, 2014;Yao and Zhang, 2015;Easterly and Pennings, 2017;Martinez-Bravo, 2017;Xu, 2018;Bertrand et al, 2018). We instead focus on information frictions constraining leaders' decisionmaking.…”