We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

Exploiting three variations in sickness absence policy for civil servants in Italy, this paper assesses the importance of monitoring and monetary incentives in addressing absenteeism. Sickness absence is sensitive to monitoring intervals for random inspections, while moderate monetary incentives...