We formally model the impact of presidential policymaking on the willingness of bureaucrats to exert effort and stay in the government. In the model, centralized policy initiative by the president demotivates policy-oriented bureaucrats and can impel them to quit rather than implicate themselves...

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to understand the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, costs and quality. Our review reveals...

Pay-as-you-go Social Security is typically characterized as a universal defined benefit pension program. Implicit in this characterization is a sense that the participant's investment in future benefits is somehow guaranteed, or safe from risk. This study develops the concept of "political risk"...

Many government social insurance policies have low take-up. To understand whether this is due to administrative barriers, information, or low valuation of the insurance, we study an unusual policy experiment in Thailand that offered a very large lump-sum incentive for informal workers in...

We study how the organization of the state evolves over the process of development of a nation, using a new dataset on the internal organization of the U.S. federal bureaucracy over 1817-1905. First, we show a series of facts, describing how the size of the state, its presence across the...

Using a large, unique dataset on the Chinese housing market, we propose to measure corruption using the price differences paid by bureaucrat buyers and non-bureaucrat buyers in the housing market. We find that the housing price paid by bureaucrat buyers is on average 1.05 percentage points lower...

Growing concerns about low awareness and take-up rates for government support programs like college financial aid have spurred calls to simplify the application process and enhance visibility. This project examines the effects of two experimental treatments designed to test of the importance of...

Inefficiencies in the bureaucratic organization of the state are often viewed as important factors in retarding economic development. Why certain societies choose or end up with such inefficient organizations has received very little attention, however. In this paper, we present a simple theory...

Bureaucratic quality in terms of the level of corruption varies widely across countries, and is in general slow to evolve relative to the speed with which many economic polices can be implemented such as the imposition of capital controls. In this paper, we study the possibility that quality of...

Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional government bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish. I focus on the role that internal...