Email
p.barteska@lse.ac.uk

Office Address
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE

Placement Officer
Matthias Doepke

Supervisors
Oriana Bandiera
Gharad Bryan
Robin Burgess

References
Oriana Bandiera
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
o.bandiera@lse.ac.uk

Gharad Bryan
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
g.t.bryan@lse.ac.uk

Robin Burgess
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
r.burgess@lse.ac.uk

James A. Robinson
University of Chicago
Harris School of Public Policy
1307 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA 
jamesrobinson@uchicago.edu

Bureaucrats as Drivers of Korean Exports (with Jay Euijung Lee)

Does the success of industrial policy depend on bureaucratic capacity? We use novel archival data on South Korean bureaucrats who implement a formally uniform industrial policy. These bureaucrats promote Korean exports on appointments to 87 countries between 1965 and 2001. We exploit the rotation of bureaucrats between offices to show that individual bureaucrats matter greatly in boosting exports. Moving from a bureaucrat at the 20th percentile to the median is associated with a 50-60% increase in exports. This is comparable to the effect of an office opening, implying that export promotion is ineffective under a 20th percentile bureaucrat. Better bureaucrats may increase exports by transmitting information about market conditions. We find that Korean exports react more strongly to import demand under high ability bureaucrats. Finally, isolating quasi-random variation in bureaucrat experience, we find that exports increase in a particular product when the bureaucrat has previous experience with it. The effect of experience is small compared to the differences in bureaucrat effects, suggesting selecting good bureaucrats may be more important than training them.

Publications

Mass Vaccination and Educational Attainment: evidence from the 1967–68 Measles Eradication Campaign (with Sonja Dobkowitz, Maarit Olkkola and Michael Rieser). Accepted at the Journal of Health Economics.
We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy ex-ploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles inci-dence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against measles increased the years of education on average by about 0.1 years in the affected cohorts. We also find tentative evidence that the college graduation rate of men increased.

Works in progress

Bureaucrats who Risk Kidnappings to Go to Work? Experiments on Social Norms in Haïti's Bureaucracy (with James A. Robinson and Jonathan Weigel)
Investigating the Deep: Weberian or Patronage Networks in Haïti's Bureaucracy? (with James A. Robinson and Jonathan Weigel)