Bank sought to influence during our period of study (2004-2013). We cannot be certain that all survey respondents provided answers on the basis of policy decisions that they themselves made or directly witnessed, but the types of respondents who participated in the survey are substantially more proximate to the empirical phenomena of interest—World Bank influence on the policy priorities of its client countries—than any other population.<sup>15</sup> A public opinion survey or a survey of experts would have been far less useful, as these populations generally know little about the inner-workings of government (Hoffmann-Lange 2007; Tansey 2007; Parks and Masaki 2019).

Another attractive feature of the _2014 Reform Efforts Survey_ is that it provides rich data on the individual characteristics of policymakers. The survey asked each government official a battery of questions about his or her position (rank), primary area of policy expertise, job responsibilities, educational background, length of government service, reform orientation, personal communications and interactions with donor agencies and international organizations, etc. We can therefore control for characteristics of policymakers that may affect the ways in which they perceive or report the influence of the World Bank. The fact that the survey asked respondents to evaluate the influence of the World Bank in a specific country, policy domain, and time period also enables us to model with fixed effects at the level of country-policy cluster pairs.<sup>16</sup> We are thus able to expunge the potentially confounding

> 15A key strength of the survey is the fact that it includes _attributional_ responses from policymakers with firsthand knowledge of the domestic and external factors that influenced the policy priorities and reform efforts of their governments. However, given that individual respondents evaluated the influence of the World Bank based on their own personal observations and experiences, a natural question that arises is whether these evaluations correlate with independently-generated measures of development policy change. Masaki and Parks (2019) provide evidence that suggests the construct validity of our dependent variable is strong. With data from the _2014 Reform Efforts Survey_ , they demonstrate that our measure of the World Bank’s agenda-setting influence is a strong predictor of improvements on the World Bank’s distance to frontier (DTF) measure of the ease of doing business. The DTF measure varies on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater ease of doing business. Masaki and Parks (2019) find that a one unit increase in respondent ratings of the World Bank’s policy influence—within the business environment policy domain—is associated with a 1 percent increase in DTF values over time.

16To ensure that we have sufficient variation within pairs, we cross-walked the 24 different policy domains in the _2014 Reform Efforts Survey_ to five broad policy clusters that the World Bank uses to categorize its own activities: macroeconomic and structural policy (MSP), human development (HD), sustainable development (SD), governance (GOV), and other. See Table A1 in the appendix for a description of how we map survey respondents’ 24 different policy domains to these five different policy clusters.

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