In recent years, there has been increasing interest in whether and how bureaucratic
effectiveness contributes to development. Just what makes for an effective bureaucracy and …

In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public employment
decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections …

I combine newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the British colonial
administration for the period 1854–1966 to study how patronage affects the promotion and …

Bureaucracies are configured differently to private sector and political organizations. Across
a wide range of civil services entry is competitive, promotion is constrained by seniority, jobs …

We design a field experiment to study how the allocation of authority between frontline
procurement officers and their monitors affects performance both directly and through the …

There is a broad consensus that state capacity is central to economic and institutional
development. But while the concept originated as a tool for macro-historical and …

We estimate the causal real economic effects of a randomized anti-corruption crackdown on
local governments in Brazil using rich micro-data on corruption and firms. After anti …

Developing nations demand a different scholarly approach in the field of public
administration. We advance an agenda for research that stands on four pillars. First, in the …

We use newly digitized records from the post office to study the effects of strengthened state
capacity between 1875 and 1901. Exploiting the implementation of the Pendleton Act—a …

We study how search frictions in the labor market affect firms' ability to recruit talented
workers. In a field experiment in Ethiopia, we show that an employer can attract more …