Civil service rules governing the selection and motivation of bureaucrats are among the defining institutions of modern democracies. Although this is an active area of reform in the US and elsewhere, economic analyses of the issue are virtually nonexistent. This paper provides the first welfare...

This paper studies the policy impact of civil service regulations, exploiting reforms undertaken by US state governments throughout the 20th century. These reforms replaced political patronage with a civil service recruited based on merit and protected from politics. I find that state...