Institute for Quantitative Social Science @ Harvard (@iqss.bsky.social)

Starting at 4:30, #NYU associate professor @tara-slough.bsky.social presents "Bureaucratic Incentives and Data Production: Evidence from Social Registries" at this week's Alesina Seminar. www.iq.harvard.edu/event/tara-s... #PoliticalScience #SocialPrograms #DataAnalysis

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Alesina Seminar - "Bureaucratic Incentives and Data Production: Evidence from Social Registries" How do local politicians influence their constituents’ access to national means-tested social programs? I argue that they do so through personnel policy. Politicians rely on bureaucrats to maintain social registries—the administrative data used for means testing—and can therefore shape program eligibility by selecting and monitoring registry administrators to boost enrollment. Using social-registry microdata from Colombia and Brazil, I find that newly appointed bureaucrats do in fact exert more effort and classify more households as poor, in part because politicians monitor them more closely (as I find using an original survey of municipal registry administrators in Colombia)... https://www.iq.harvard.edu/event/tara-slough-alesina-seminar