within-country project effectiveness variation. Shin et al. (2017) find that World Bank projects implemented by non-governmental actors have better evaluation scores, albeit acknowledging their reduced number of only 29 of the 647 projects they study.

While the quality of project design may be difficult to define and observe, there have been a few attempts to investigate the role of design quality – the extent to which project objectives are relevant and achievable – in project success. Higher scores on the quality of the economic analysis in project appraisal documents are associated with better ratings during project implementation (Vawda et al., 2003; Corral and McCarthy, 2020), while projects with weak or unclear results frameworks are more likely to be downgraded (Blanc et al., 2016). Studies using quality-at-entry of World Bank projects measured by the IEG produce similar findings (Chauvet et al., 2010; Smets et al., 2013; Wane, 2004). Perceptions of World Bank managers confirm project design as a critical success factor (Ika et al., 2012).<sup>5</sup> Moreover, early studies indicate that a strong analytical underpinning – proxied by labor inputs from designated analytic staff – is positively associated with the quality of World Bank projects (Deiniger et al., 1998; Wane, 2004).

# **_2.2. Staff and management characteristics_**

Several studies have investigated the role of project supervision in subsequent project performance. In one example, Kilby (2000) finds the number of weeks dedicated to project supervision has a positive and significant association with project performance. Relatedly, Kilby (2001) concludes that the benefit of project supervision is expressed strongly in the early stages of implementation and diminishes as the project progresses. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that poorly designed projects are difficult to turn around and that supervision cannot wholly compensate for poor quality at entry (Corral and McCarthy, 2020; Limodio, 2011).

Others have investigated the association of supervisory staff characteristics with project success, including attempts to proxy for supervision inputs on the quality margin as well as the quantity margin. Denizer et al. (2013) proxy for good supervisory leadership with a measure of supervisory quality defined as the weighted average success rate of all projects that the TTL has ever worked on (with weights that are proportional to how much time the TTL spent on each project). They estimate that a one standard deviation increase in the TTL track record variable is linked with an increase in the chance of project success by 6%. Moll et al. (2015) extend the work on supervisor quality to include a quantity measure of experience, as well as the average success of past projects. They find a positive and significant relation of project success with the TTL quality variable, as found before, but they also find that the number of projects taken to the Board by the TTL is not a reliable indicator of the likelihood of project success.

The role of staff in other key phases of the project cycle, such as project design, or staff who serve as overall management at the country or sector level, have been little studied. Two notable exceptions, using World Bank project and personnel data, are Honig (2020) and Limodio (2021). Since these studies rely on publicly available and web-scrapped data, there are differences in data set size and quality: while Limodio (2021) analyzed a selected sample of 715 TTLs who post their CVs on public websites, we rely on Human

> 5 IEG project evaluations include a ‘quality at entry’ rating, which captures the ‘extent to which the World Bank identified, facilitated preparation of, and appraised the project so that it was most likely to achieve planned development outcomes and was consistent with the World Bank’s fiduciary role.’ The interpretive challenge with this ex-post measure is that it is simultaneously generated with the overall project rating and therefore highly correlated with it.

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