PhD Graduate in Economics, Department of Economics, LSE
Contact information
Email: mbest@stanford.edu
Phone number: +1 415 316 5006
Address: Department of Economics || London School of Economics and Political Science || Houghton Street || London WC2A 2AE
Research interests
Primary Fields: Public Economics
Secondary Fields: Development Economics
Job Market Paper
Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness, and Consequences for Policy Design (with Jonas Hjort and David Szakonyi)
Abstract
Why do some state entities perform a given task so much better than others? Can we attribute these differences to the individuals and organizations implementing policy? And what are the implications for policy design? We first use a new text-based machine learning method to assign the 25 million goods purchased in Russian procurement auctions from 2011 to 2015 to comparable categories. We show that the causal impact of individual bureaucrats and the organizations they work for are large, together accounting for one third of the within-good variation in prices, and that effective bureaucrats and organizations achieve low prices by lowering entry costs and encouraging seller participation. Guided by an endogenous entry auction model with variation in auctioneer effectiveness, we analyze the implications of bureaucrat/organization heterogeneity for the impact of a ubiquitous procurement policy: granting bidding preferences to a specific group of bidders. When the bureaucracy is effective, favoring domestically produced goods lowers participation and increases prices, while when bureaucratic effectiveness is low, the effect is reversed. These results that there are large returns to improving bureaucratic effectiveness, but that holding state effectiveness fixed, using policy to encourage entry can act as a substitute for improving state effectiveness.
Publications and Additional Papers
Publications
Production vs Revenue Efficiency with Limited Tax Capacity: Theory and Evidence From Pakistan (with Anne Brockmeyer, Henrik Kleven, Johannes Spinnewijn and Mazhar Waseem) Journal of Political Economy, 123 (6), 1311-1355, 2015
Housing Market Responses to Transaction Taxes: Evidence from Notches and Stimulus in the UK (with Henrik Kleven) forthcoming, Review of Economic Studies
Additional Papers
Interest Rates, Debt and Intertemporal Allocation: Evidence From Notched Mortgage Contracts in the UK (with James Cloyne, Ethan Ilzetzki and Henrik Kleven) August 2015
Salary Misreporting and the Role of Firms in Workers’ Responses to Taxes: Evidence from Pakistan, May 2014
Optimal Income Taxation with Career Effects of Work Effort (with Henrik Kleven) February 2013. Revise & Resubmit at the American Economic Review