Title: Bureaucrats in Congress: Strategic Information Sharing in Policymaking

Abstract: Given bureaucratic expertise and the critical role of information in policy production, what drives information sharing between bureaucrats and legislators? We argue that partisan alignment between the two drive the amount and type of information that bureaucrats choose to share with Congress. Using the most comprehensive data yet on agency affiliation, appointment type, and agency-level characteristics of each bureaucrat who testified in Congress from 1977-2014, as well as a new measure of informational content present in bureaucratic testimonies, we show that bureaucrats provide less analytical information under divided government. Further, we examine bureaucrat-legislator pair-level interactions in committee hearings and show that bureaucrats provide less analytical information to legislators who are presidential out-partisans than legislators who are presidential co-partisans even after controlling for legislators’ questioning styles, and that this behavior is heightened among bureaucrats who are political appointees. These dynamics highlight bureaucrats’ strategic incentives to selectively share information with Congress.

At this AE reading group we are going to discuss the following paper: Bandiera, Oriana, Greg Fischer, Andrea Prat and Erina Ytsma. 2021. "Do Women Respond Less to Performance Pay? Building Evidence from Multiple Experiments." American Economic Review: Insights, 3 (4): 435-54. Negar Ziaeian will prepare a presentation.

Here is the abstract: Existing empirical work raises the hypothesis that performance pay—whatever its output gains—may widen the gender earnings gap because women may respond less to incentives. We evaluate this possibility by aggregating evidence from existing experiments on performance incentives with male and female subjects. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model, we estimate both the average effect and heterogeneity across studies. We find that the gender response difference is close to zero and heterogeneity across studies is small, while performance pay increases output by 0.36 standard deviations on average. The data thus support agency theory for men and women alike.

Title: It Takes a Village: The Economics of Parenting with Neighborhood and Peer Effects