Bureaucratic Investments in Expertise: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Field Trial

Abstract

How can elected officials induce bureaucrats to invest in acquiring the expertise necessary to provide high-quality public services? To address this question, we test and extend aspects of Gailmard and Patty’s expertise model in the context of contemporary governance using a unique randomized controlled field experiment of school principals in Denmark. Consistent with the expertise model, we find that bureaucratic agents randomly assigned greater discretion in the allocation of personnel resources were more likely to acquire information on school performance. We extend the model in two ways. First, we show that discretion effects are stronger when the information available aligns with bureaucratic goal preferences. Second, we show that institutional design choices that improve the relative benefits of the information increase information acquisition.