TY  - BOOK
AU  - Mastrorocco,Nicola
AU  - Teso,Edoardo
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State Over 100 Years
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2023///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
KW  - Bureaucracy • Administrative Processes in Public Organizations • Corruption
KW  - jelc
KW  - Firm Employment Decisions • Promotions
KW  - U.S. • Canada: Pre-1913
KW  - General
N1  - August 2023; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - We study how the organization of the state evolves over the process of development of a nation, using a new dataset on the internal organization of the U.S. federal bureaucracy over 1817-1905. First, we show a series of facts, describing how the size of the state, its presence across the territory, and its key organizational features evolved over the nineteenth century. Second, exploiting the staggered expansion of the railroad and telegraph networks across space, we show that the ability of politicians to monitor state agents throughout the territory is an important driver of these facts: locations with lower transportation and communication costs with Washington DC have more state presence, are delegated more decision power, and have lower employee turnover. The results suggest that high monitoring costs are associated with small, personalistic state organizations based on networks of trust; technological shocks lowering monitoring costs facilitate the emergence of modern bureaucratic states
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w31591
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w31591
ER  -