Motivating Bureaucrats With Non-Monetary Incentives When State Capacity Is Weak: Evidence From Large-Scale Field Experiments in Peru

Abstract

Motivating bureaucrats with non-monetary incentives when state capacity is weak: Evidence from large-scale field experiments in Peru *

Voluntary audits: Experimental evidence on a new approach to monitoring front-line bureaucrats

“…The limitations of existing models of oversight have prompted some recent experimental studies that provide evidence that novel forms of oversight, including information and non-financial inducements, can increase the effort exerted by bureaucrats and other public-service providers (Ashraf, Bandiera, and Jack, 2014;Bandiera et al 2020;Dustan, Maldonado, and Hernandez-Agramonte 2018). This shift in the experimental literature resonates with a separate literature that highlights the limitations of the principal-agent approach and places greater emphasis on a diverse range of explanations of bureaucratic motivation and effort.…”

“…Much of this literature draws heavily on the principal-agent framework, with its emphasis on the extent to which bureaucrats' preferences diverge from those of politicians and the public. Empirical work in this tradition focuses on the need to design incentives-whether material, career, or otherwise-to induce effort among individual bureaucrats (see the reviews in Dustan et al (2018) and Finan et al (2017)). Other approaches highlight the limitations of the principal-agent framework for explaining bureaucratic behavior, for example by pointing to the emergence of pockets of bureaucratic excellence across or within agencies, even in settings where incentive and oversight structures are fixed (e.g., McDonnell 2020).…”

Do Civil Servants Respond to Behavioral Interventions?: A Field Experiment

“…They also have lower downsides, particularly that of creating negative incentives towards serving the public. 4 There is some evidence that behavioral interventions induce employees to increase fuel efficiency in the airline industry (Gosnell, List, and Metcalfel, 2016) and narrow the gap in compliance with school infrastructure investments (Dustan, Maldonado, and Hernandez-Agramonte, 2020). In many contexts, there are reasons to believe that nonfinancial incentives may work better than financial ones (Ashraf, Bandiera, and Jack, 2014;Khan, Khwaja, and Olken, 2019;Khan, 2020).…”