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 …

Governments play a central role in facilitating economic development. Yet while economists
have long emphasized the importance of government quality, historically they have paid less …

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 …

We present evidence that cultural proximity (shared codes, beliefs, ethnicity) between
lenders and borrowers increases the quantity of credit and reduces default. We identify in …

Using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, we find that an increase in female
representation in local government induces a large and significant rise in documented …

This essay tries to bring out some of the complexities that are overlooked in the usual
treatment of the state in the institutional economics literature and supplement the latter with a …

When do politicians prompt bureaucrats to provide effective services? Leveraging the
uneven overlap of jurisdictions in India, we compare bureaucrats supervised by a single …

This article reviews the literature on the politics of bureaucracy in the developing world, with
a focus on service delivery and bureaucratic performance. We survey classic topics and …

We combine personnel records of the United States federal bureaucracy from 1997 to 2019
with administrative voter registration data to study how ideological alignment between …