Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local leadership could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to impressing/pleasing their evaluator, relative to working...

In this paper, we demonstrate that university students who cheat on a simple task in a laboratory setting are more likely to state a preference for entering public service. Importantly, we also show that cheating on this task is predictive of corrupt behavior by real government workers, implying...

We argue that China, with its long history, a relatively stable political system, and multiple regime changes, provides us an opportunity to investigate the political economy of administrative hierarchy. Using prefecture-level panel data and exploiting regime changes during AD1000-2000, we find...

We examine the correlation between gender and bureaucratic corruption using two distinct datasets, one from Italy and a second from China. In each case, we find that women are far less likely to be investigated for corruption than men. In our Italian data, female procurement officials are 34...

A relatively mild form of government failure - for example, bureaucrats can count but do not differentiate quality - can significantly affect the efficacy of industrial policy. We investigate this idea in the context of China's largest pro-innovation industrial policy using a structural model....