Seminario CIE-Edoardo Teso (Northwestern University)
De 12.00 a 13.30 h
Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
El Centro de Investigación Económica (CIE), te invita al seminario: "State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State Over 100 Years"
Presentado por: Edoardo Teso (Northwestern University)
El seminario se llevará a cabo el 27 de octubre de 12:00 a 13:30 horas en la Sala de Seminarios de Santa Teresa.
Abstract:
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.
