Jobs for Sale: Corruption and Misallocation in Hiring

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Weaver, Jeffrey
• 署名单位: University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20201062
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 3093-3122
• 关键词: financial incentives; political-economy; selection; patronage; BRIBERY; state

摘要

Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional wisdom, their observable quality is comparable to counterfactual merit-based hires. Exploiting variation across jobs, I show that the consequences of corrupt allocations depend on the correlation between wealth and quality among applicants: service delivery outcomes are good for jobs where this was positive and poor when negative. In this setting, the correlation was typically positive, leading to relatively good performance of hires.