Countries strive to upgrade their civil service quality in many directions, thus responding to major contemporary challenges and following the trends of open innovation. The 2030 civil servant will require a wide set of soft and hard skills that are not common among the today’s public...

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...

A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task...