Does the effect of industrial policy depend on the capacity of the bureaucrats implementing it? We exploit the three-yearly rotation of managers of South Korea’s export promotion offices in 87 countries between 1965 and 2000 to show that a one standard deviation increase in bureaucrat ability boosts exports by 37%. Under higher-ability bureaucrats, South Korean exports respond more strongly to a country’s import demand, suggesting a more effective transmission of market information. Higher-ability bureaucrats are also more likely to serve multiple appointments, consistent with first appointments functioning as screening devices for bureaucrats. Lastly, bureaucrat experience matters – the products a bureaucrat is exposed to during their first appointment also see export increases in subsequent appointments. This signifies that while organizational capacity can grow endogenously, it might also exhibit path dependence.

We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against measles increased the years of education on average by about 0.1 years in the affected cohorts. We also find tentative evidence that the college graduation rate of men increased.

Firm-directed policies are central to governments’ economic agendas. But under low state capacity convincing firms to take up such policies is difficult because (i) lack of knowledge of firms among implementing bureaucrats may render policies less effective or harmful, (ii) firms may mistrust the policies’ and bureaucrats’ motives. We have received funding to study a government-run labor market matching program in Addis Ababa to test a potential solution, increased bureaucrat-firm embeddedness. We will incentivize a subset of 300 bureaucrats in local units of the Ministry of Labor and Skills to have one-on-one meetings with 8 firms to (i) increase knowledge of frictions faced by firms regarding hiring and (ii) develop trust from firms in the local bureaucracy. We will first observe whether treated bureaucrats have more accurate information of firms’ hiring needs and whether treated firms develop more trust in local bureaucrats. We will then evaluate the effects on the labor market policy, including (i) the number of vacancies collected during a “mobilization drive” two months after our intervention, (ii) the number of successful matches, and (iii) the match quality. In addition to the pure treatment effect, we will also assess spillovers on control firms and control bureaucrats.