Performance Incentives and Bureaucratic Behavior: Evidence from a Federal Bureaucracy

This paper examines the effects of performance incentives in a federal job training program for the economically disadvantaged. I find that job training bureaucrats respond to incentives in ways that are consistent with a simple model of bureaucratic behavior. Additionally I am able to test whether attempts by the program's incentive designers to improve the precision of performance measures in the late 1980s increased or decreased efficiency. I discuss my results in the context of the greater incentive literature, as well as the literature on incentives in job training programs.