Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service¤

We study how the management practices under which public sector bureaucrats operate, correlate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered. We do so in a develop-ing country context, exploiting data from the Nigerian Civil Service linking public sector organizations to the individual projects they are responsible for. For each of 4700 projects, we have hand coded independent engineering assessments of each project’s completion rate and delivered quality. We supplement this information with a survey we conducted to elicit management practices for bureaucrats in each of the 63 civil service organizations respon-sible for these projects, following the approach of Bloom and Van Reenen [2007]. We …nd management practices related to autonomy signi…cantly increase project completion rates and project quality; management practices related to performance-based incentives signi…-cantly decrease project completion rates and project quality. We then document: (i) how the impacts of autonomy vary by project and organizational characteristics following Aghion and Tirole [1997]; (ii) whether the negative impacts of performance related management practices are driven by issues related to project complexity/multi-tasking, and bureaucrat