Bureaucrat time-use: Evidence from a survey experiment

Abstract

• We provide correlational evidence that the structure of time use matters for service delivery outcomes. • We experiment with various modes of measuring the time use of public officials in an Ethiopian Government setting. • Asking about granular details of a respondent’s work induces under- and over-reporting of time spent on certain tasks. • We find that time use varies significantly with bureaucrat characteristics and management practices. Bureaucratic effectiveness is an important input into state capacity. The tasks public officials choose to spend their time on determines how their human capital impacts national development. Yet empirical evidence on the measurement and allocation of public officials’ time use is scarce. We provide empirical evidence in this domain through a survey experiment with Ethiopian bureaucrats. We randomly test alternative measures of bureaucratic time use by varying recall period, enumeration methodology and the degree of task detail in recall surveys. Relative to time-use diaries, we find that the best-performing survey modules differ by roughly a third of working time and that requesting more detailed breakdowns of time use significantly increases this disparity. We explore empirically how the allocation of time use correlates with individual characteristics, management practices, and service delivery outcomes.