The Limits of Meritocracy: Screening Bureaucrats Under Imperfect Verifiability /
Suárez Serrato, Juan Carlos.
The Limits of Meritocracy: Screening Bureaucrats Under Imperfect Verifiability / Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Xiao Yu Wang, Shuang Zhang. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w21963 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21963. .
February 2016.
Does bureaucratic ability predict promotion in governments? We show that self-reported performance in enforcing the One Child Policy predicts mayoral promotion in China. However, misreporting handicaps screening--a non-manipulated performance measure does not predict promotion. We show that this is consistent with a model where a government has a meritocratic objective but underestimates the imperfect verifiability of performance, rather than a model where a government is only interested in the illusion of meritocracy. Thus, despite meritocratic intentions, we challenge the notion that a successful promotion system effectively substituted for democratic institutions in explaining Chinese growth.
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Mode of access: World Wide Web.
The Limits of Meritocracy: Screening Bureaucrats Under Imperfect Verifiability / Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Xiao Yu Wang, Shuang Zhang. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w21963 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21963. .
February 2016.
Does bureaucratic ability predict promotion in governments? We show that self-reported performance in enforcing the One Child Policy predicts mayoral promotion in China. However, misreporting handicaps screening--a non-manipulated performance measure does not predict promotion. We show that this is consistent with a model where a government has a meritocratic objective but underestimates the imperfect verifiability of performance, rather than a model where a government is only interested in the illusion of meritocracy. Thus, despite meritocratic intentions, we challenge the notion that a successful promotion system effectively substituted for democratic institutions in explaining Chinese growth.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.