Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India

Lakshmi Iyer and Anandi Mani
Additional contact information
Anandi Mani: University of Warwick

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2012, vol. 94, issue 3, 723-739

Abstract: We develop a framework to empirically examine how politicians with electoral pressures control bureaucrats with career concerns and the consequent implications for bureaucrats' career investments. Unique microlevel data on Indian bureaucrats support our key predictions. Politicians use frequent reassignments (transfers) across posts of varying importance to control bureaucrats. High-skilled bureaucrats face less frequent political transfers and lower variability in the importance of their posts. We find evidence of two alternative paths to career success: officers of higher initial ability are more likely to invest in skill, but caste affinity to the politician's party base also helps secure important positions. © 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: career concerns; bureaucracy; bureaucrat reassignment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D73 D78 H83 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00183 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India (2010)
Working Paper: Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:94:y:2012:i:3:p:723-739

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().