Influence Activities and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in China

Alain de Janvry (), Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet (), Shaoda Wang () and Qiong Zhang ()
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Shaoda Wang: Corresponding Author, Department of Economics and EPIC, University of Chicago.
Qiong Zhang: School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China.

No 2019-69, HKUST IEMS Working Paper Series from HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

Abstract: Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to senior leadership could induce influence activities: agents might devote much efforts to please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefit their organizations. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese local government employees and provide the first rigorous empirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that state employees are able to impose evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, and that this process could be partly observed by their co-workers. Furthermore, introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator, which discourages evaluator-specific influence activities, can significantly improve the work performance of state employees.Keywords: Alternative data, Satellite Imagery, Asset price impact, Macroeconomic Estimates

Keywords: subjective evaluation; civil servants; work performance; incentive; favoritism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 F63 M12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2019-09, Revised 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hku:wpaper:201969

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