#  Tara Slough (Alesina Seminar) 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 23, 2026** 

 04:30PM - 05:45PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Littauer Center, room M-16**  

 [1805 Cambridge Street  
Cambridge, MA 02138  
United States



 ](<https://www.google.com/maps?q=US MA Cambridge 02138 1805 Cambridge Street>) 

Department of Economics

 

 

 



 

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.



 

Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.

All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.



 

 



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 See also:- [ Alesina Seminar on Political Economy ](/program/seminar-political-economy)
 
 

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