The Glittering Prizes: Career Incentives and Bureaucrat Performance
By Marianne Bertrand, Robin Burgess, Arunish Chawla, Guo Xu. The Review of Economic Studies, 2019
141 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Bureaucracies are configured differently to private sector and political organizations. Across a wide range of civil services entry is competitive, promotion is constrained by seniority, jobs are for life, and retirement occurs at a fixed age. This implies that older entering officers, who are less likely to attain the glittering prize of reaching the top of the bureaucracy before they retire, may be less motivated to exert effort. Using a nationwide stakeholder survey and rich administrative data on elite civil servants in India, we provide evidence that: (i) officers who cannot reach the senior-most positions before they retire are perceived to be less effective and are more likely to be suspended and (ii) this effect is weakened by a reform that extends the retirement age. Together, these results suggest that the career incentive of reaching the top of a public organization is a powerful determinant of bureaucrat performance.
Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4651c18924a19af32f63833ef070f8f2dc0ebd7f
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Citations in the corpus
- Patronage and Selection in Public Sector Organizations (2020, background): “Studies in this growing literature have analyzed the role of incentives in the selection and performance of public sector workers (Dal Bó et al., 2013; Ashraf et al., 2014; Ashraf et al., 2016; Fisman and Wang, 2017; Deserranno, 2017; Khan et al., 2016; Bertrand et al., 2018; Khan et al., 2018), the”