This article reviews the literature on the politics of bureaucracy in the developing world, with
a focus on service delivery and bureaucratic performance. We survey classic topics and …

When do politicians prompt bureaucrats to provide effective services? Leveraging the
uneven overlap of jurisdictions in India, we compare bureaucrats supervised by a single …

Political favoritism affects the allocation of government resources, but is it consequential for
growth? Using a close election regression discontinuity design and data from India, we …

Politically-driven corruption is a pervasive challenge for development, but evidence of its
welfare effects are scarce. Using data from a major rural road construction programme in …

Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors, while others assign public
contracts more impartially? This article emphasizes the important interplay between politics …

Can research findings change political leaders' beliefs and policies? We use experiments
with 2,150 Brazilian municipalities to measure mayors' demand for and response to …

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 …

We study the causal impact of electing criminally accused politicians to state legislative
assemblies in India on the subsequent economic performance of their constituencies. Using …

There has been a phenomenal global increase in the proportion of women in politics in the
last two decades, but there is no evidence of how this has influenced economic …

With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and
incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too …