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 what are the building blocks of state capacity remain subject to debate. This paper reviews the arguments connecting...

The current paper presents a method of deciding the question of whether any given stage in the budget process is an example of the "political" or the "bureaucratic" model. We then use it to study local government spending on education. The basis for our method is the important difference between...

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...

Meritocracies that aim to identify high-ability bureaucrats are less effective when performance is imperfectly observed. First, we show meritocratic governments forgo output maximization when they design incentives that screen for ability. This trade-off has empirical implications that reveal...

High administrative costs in U.S. health care have provoked concern among policymakers over potential waste, but many of these costs are generated by managed care policies that trade off bureaucratic costs against reductions in moral hazard. We study this trade-off for prior authorization...

How do administrative burdens influence enrollment in different welfare programs? Who is screened out at a given stage? This paper studies the impacts of increased administrative burdens associated with the automation of welfare caseworker assistance, leveraging a unique natural experiment in...