TY  - INPR
PB  - American Economic Association
A1  - Hjort, Jonas
A1  - Best, Michael C
A1  - Szakonyi, David
JF  - The American Economic Review
N1  - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions.
ID  - discovery10169814
UR  - https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191598
N2  - Bureaucrats implement policy. How important are they for a state?s productivity? And do the tradeoffs between policies depend on their effectiveness? Using data on 16 million public purchases in Russia, we show that 39 percent of the variation in prices paid for narrowly defined items is due to the individual bureaucrats and organizations who manage procurement. Low-price buyers also display higher spending quality. Theory suggests that such differences in effectiveness can be pivotal for policy design. To illustrate, we show that a common one?bid preferences for domestic suppliers?substantially improves procurement performance, but only when implemented by ineffective bureaucrats.
AV  - public
TI  - Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness
SN  - 0002-8282
Y1  - 2023/07/01/
ER  -