Tara Slough (Alesina Seminar)

Tara Slough (NYU), "Bureaucratic Incentives and Data Production: Evidence from Social Registries"

Abstract

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). But within-bureaucrat analysis of registry data in Brazil shows that replacement limits the development of expertise, highlighting the central constraint on the effectiveness of repeated appointments. These results clarify the agency dynamics that determine transfers in two of the hemisphere’s biggest anti-poverty programs. More broadly, they underscore the importance of accounting for strategic interactions between politicians and bureaucrats in the production of administrative data.