Organization of the State: Home Assignment and Bureaucrat Performance

Abstract

How to allocate personnel is a central question in the organization of the state. We link survey data on the performance of 1,472 elite civil servants in India to their personnel records between 1975-2005 to study how home allocations affect their performance and careers. Using exogenous variation in home assignment generated by an allocation rule, we find that bureaucrats assigned to their home states are perceived to be less effective and more likely to be suspended. These negative effects are driven by states with higher levels of corruption and cohorts with greater numbers of home state officers. ∗First draft: December 2017. This paper has benefited from comments of seminar participants at the NBER Organizational Economics Meeting, the University of Houston, Northwestern Kellogg, Uppsala, Columbia GSB, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics Summer Forum, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Chicago Harris, the BPP-GEM workshop, the Stanford Quality of Governance workshop and the ABCDE World Bank conference. We thank Oriana Bandiera, Tim Besley, Michael Callen, Arunish Chawla, Ernesto Dal Bo, Esther Duflo, Miguel Espinosa, Fred Finan, Olle Folke, Guido Friebel, Saad Gulzar, Rema Hanna, Julien Labonne, Anandi Mani, Jan Pierskalla, Andrea Prat, Johanne Rickne, John de Figueiredo, Daniel Rogger for their valuable comments. Finally, we particularly thank a group of senior IAS officers for sharing their institutional knowledge, and Lakshmi Iyer and Anandi Mani for sharing their data on empanelment outcomes. Fraser Clark, Anton Heil, Rebecca Rose, Jinling Yang and Jiemin Xu provided excellent research assistance. A previous version of this paper has been circulated under the title “Social Proximity and Bureaucrat Performance: Evidence from India.” All errors remain our own. †Guo Xu (corresponding author): guo.xu@berkeley.edu; Marianne Bertrand: marianne.bertrand@chicagobooth.edu; Robin Burgess: r.burgess@lse.ac.uk.