We examine the power of incentives in bureaucracies by studying contracts offered by a bureaucrat to her agent. The bureaucrat operates under a fixed budget, optimally chosen by a funding authority, and she can engage in policy drift, which we define as inversely related to her intrinsic...

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

I exploit a 2007 scandal concerning the General Services Administration (GSA) to examine whether executives can alter the bureaucratic allocation of government expenditures for electoral purposes. The GSA contracts with private vendors to provide supplies to, and acquire and maintain buildings...