Bureaucrats and Politicians: Electoral Competition and Dynamic Incentives

Anusha Nath
Additional contact information
Anusha Nath: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

No 896, 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper shows that electoral competition can adversely impact bureaucratic performance. Politicians use promise of favorable future promotions to incentivize career bureaucrats. Higher competition results in lower probability of re-election; making promises less credible and resulting in worse performance. Constructing a unique dataset from India based on bureaucrats’ work histories and using a novel identification strategy, results show that bureaucrats perform better close to their pre-determined promotion screening dates. Across politicians, the same bureaucrat performs better for incumbents more likely to be in office during screening. Results hold when effects of exogenously changing re-election probabilities are examined within bureaucrat-politician pairs.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2018/paper_896.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed018:896

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().