Do managerial bureaucrats impact the quality of service provision for difficult-to-monitor tasks? In my JMP, I argue that they do but that the type of bureaucrats having an impact is not what gets most attention in the literature (and from politicians or the media). 🧵

Will I get a good income out of doing a PhD? Of course not. But will I at least also find a stable job that allows me to pursue my research? Also no. But will I at least be happy doing what I like? Hahaha also no. Sounds terrible. Where do one sign up?

Very happy to be able share the polling-level dataset on Indian elections 2009, 2014, 2019 that we have been working on for more than a decade. Both the data and the data descriptor in @ScientificData are open access. @p_gupta93 @UniOslo_SVfak

Out today! Thanks to the village who helped make this happen! @CUP_PoliSci

Our detailed story @the_hindu today analysing the decadal study of CAG on examining macro-fiscal health of States, myths attached & more… as you look deeper into the numbers there is a lot to unpack (particularly on the borrowing patterns across states) https://t.co/8ADYAmVBbm

Important stuff!

Many of our first-generation scholars have made it to top universities, but lack laptops for their studies. To ensure financial hurdles don’t limit their potential, Eklavya India Foundation has launched a Laptop Donation Drive.

Here he is giving an extraordinary lecture at IIM Ahmedabad:

Manoj Srivastava was not only an IAS officer but also a remarkable academic at LSE. One of my favourite articles is one he co-authored on pro-poor governance in Eastern India:

Public sector employment as a share of total employment in India is at around 8% compared to 29% in the UK or 13% in the US, with a global average of 17% (WB Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators) - India needs more bureaucrats, not fewer. But it needs to manage them differently.

Finally, these findings indicate that state-cadre bureaucrats are really important. If IAS officers are the steel frame of the Indian state, state-cadre bureaucrats are the bricks and glass. Full paper as a pre-print:

This cannot be done by order. It is a labour-intensive task, taking place beyond formal settings like review meetings, and often includes symbolic acts and trust-building actions. I base this on around 40 interviews with public managers in Bihar and Karnataka.

I argue that the task of a public manager in this case is to increase mutual expectations about effort levels, and increasing these mutual expectations hinges on a public manager being able to persuade subordinates that their colleagues will reciprocate with higher effort.

Linking novel posting data with independent household surveys on learning across ten years, I show that only those bureaucrats with less authority but more ability to engage in persuasion impact learning. Why?

Using the empirical case of rural 🇮🇳 and learning in public schools, I exploit an admin setup mimicking a natural experiment with two types of bureaucrats for the same spatial unit, the district, that either have more authority or more opps for time-intensive persuasion.

Can you guess what happened when researchers in Germany gave kids e-readers & access to a large digital library of age-appropriate books? ... ... ... Reading performance went up as a direct result. But (!) so did math performance. And (!!) so did socio-emotional well-being.

The #NMMS app was introduced as a transparency tool for MGNREGS. But the app's “2 photos a day” rule is leaving many rural workers unpaid. Chakradhar Buddha highlights how tech gaps & poor design can turn rights into hurdles. Read 👉 https://t.co/tyhCoeFkw5 @MoRD_GoI

Rural childcare centres in Bidar. A firm foundation for young children’s development. An enabler for their mothers’ work in MGNREGA.

Sometimes I wonder if a factor contributing to this lack of purpose is who gets into top PhD programs. Lots of very privileged kids whose curiosity seems to come more from their reading of fancy papers than actually caring and understanding the world these papers are placed in.

I regret to agree. This kind of irrelevance unfortunately also shapes incentives for early-career researchers: clean identification is valued higher than meaningful contributions to understanding the world.