Matching in the Civil Service: A Market Design Approach to Public Administration and Development

Ashutosh Thakur ()
Additional contact information
Ashutosh Thakur: Stanford Graduate School of Business and University of Cologne

No 87, ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany

Abstract: Using a matching theory perspective, I analyze the design and the impact of Indian Civil Service state assignment mechanisms used to allocate elite civil servants to different parts of the country. I find that a recent change in the matching mechanism in 2008 has systematically skewed assignments by assigning relatively poor quality bureaucrats to disadvantaged states: regions with external foreign conflict, states with internal political strife, and newly-formed states. This paper i) analyzes the causes of these imbalances, ii) assesses the impact of this mechanism change on state capacity, development outcomes, and bureaucratic performance, and iii) highlights trade-offs in implementing alternate mechanisms. Global balance in quality across state cadres is a unique constraint that arises when applying matching to political economy settings, as the mechanism designer is a paternalistic central planner. Thus, less is left to the market compared to most canonical matching applications. On the other hand, the use of matching in political economy is also novel, and careful understanding of how different matching mechanisms address underlying correlations in the data has far-reaching consequences for bureaucratic performance and development outcomes.

Keywords: matching; civil service; bureaucracy; quality balance constraint; revenue collection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D73 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 107 pages
Date: 2021-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_087_2021.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ajk:ajkdps:087

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany Niebuhrstrasse 5, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECONtribute Office ().