Bureaucrats, Politicians and Policy Expertise

Are Politicians Really Paid Like Bureaucrats?

In this paper, we examine the empirical determinants of politicians’ pay. Contrary to widespread assumptions, we document substantial variation in the wages of politicians, both across states and over time. Using data for the US during 1950-90, we provide what we believe to be the first empirical analysis of gubernatorial pay. We find that gubernatorial wages respond to changes in state income ...

Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Government Performance: Evidence from City Treasurers∗

This paper investigates whether assigning control of government services provision to a politician or bureaucrat affects the cost of government services. Conceptually, bureaucratic control could reduce costs if (a) costs are hard for voters to observe, weakening the incentives for politicians to exert effort to reduce costs, or (b) bureaucrats’ implicit incentives to reduce costs are strong due...

Expertise and the Policy Cycle

Are Bureaucrats Really Paid Like Bureaucrats?∗

Traditionally, bureaucrats are viewed as a stereotypical example of employees with flat pay schedules and low-powered incentive schemes. This paper challenges this view by providing evidence that wages of a particular group of senior bureaucrats city managers are tightly connected to their performance. In particular, salaries of city managers are strongly linked to city growth. Additional tests...

Bureaucrats and Public Procurement

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. It is shown that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual realizations of benefit and costs of the project, the second game to be played afterward. In the first game the relationship-specific investments of agency and sel...