Original
Breaking Out of Low‐Effort Traps: Bureaucratic Leadership by Persuasion
Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper tests if bureaucratic leadership impacts the quality of service provision of a difficult‐to‐monitor task: learning in public schools. Using the empirical case of rural India, it exploits an administrative setup with two types of bureaucrats for the same spatial unit, the district, that either have more authority or more ability to engage in time‐intensive persuasion. Utilizing blocked randomization inference and bias‐corrected variance decomposition on bureaucratic postings linked to independent learning data from household surveys across 10 years, it shows that only those bureaucrats with less authority but more ability to engage in persuasion impact learning. Drawing on novel interview data, it illustrates how bureaucratic leaders can increase effort levels of subordinates through persuasion to overcome collective action problems rather than relying on orders and monitoring as principal‐agent frameworks would suggest. The findings illustrate that for difficult‐to‐monitor tasks managerial intensity and persistence trump formal authority.
中文
摆脱低努力陷阱：说服式官僚领导
摘要
本文检验官僚领导是否会影响一项难以监督的任务——公立学校中的学习——的服务供给质量。以印度农村为经验案例，本文利用一种行政安排：同一空间单位（即地区）内存在两类官僚，他们要么拥有更多权威，要么更有能力进行耗时密集型说服。基于10年间家庭调查获得的独立学习数据，将其与官僚任职信息相匹配，并运用区组随机化推断和偏差校正方差分解，本文表明，只有那些权威较少但更有能力进行说服的官僚才会影响学习。借助新收集的访谈数据，本文说明官僚领导者如何通过说服提高下属的努力水平，以克服集体行动问题，而不是像委托—代理框架所暗示的那样依赖命令与监督。研究结果表明，对于难以监督的任务，管理强度与坚持胜过正式权威。
关键词
官僚领导、说服、低努力陷阱、公共服务供给、难以监督任务、印度农村、公立学校学习、委托—代理