to acquire information determine the efficacy of interventions and technologies aimed at improving the information of public-sector agents. Our experimental findings highlight that when the public sector is designed appropriately, the rationale for compensating interventions - which are often ad hoc and focused on short term goals - is weakened.<sup>5</sup> The paper thus relates to the nascent literature on how the design of bureaucratic organizations impacts on state capabilities (reviewed by Finan et al., 2017), and on the importance of these capabilities for development outcomes (Besley and Persson, 2011; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012; Pepinksy et al., 2017).<sup>6</sup> In line with much of the recent literature on bureaucrats (such as Dal Bó et al. (2013) and Bertrand et al. (2016)), our focus is to understand the determinants of the characteristics of bureaucracy, rather than its wider effects. However, we find some evidence that superior information improves promotion prospects of bureaucrats and, in the form of stating knowledge of the indicators we focus on, improves service delivery outcomes. This is consistent with descriptive evidence from our survey that information held by civil servants on the conditions in the constituency they serve feeds into allocation and operational decisions. Officials in our survey state that on 74% of projects, “information regarding the state of operations and services in the jurisdiction makes it easier for me to know where to allocate my effort/time”. Similarly, 82% of officials stated that jurisdictional information matters for a majority of the operations (projects/programs) that they work on. It is also consistent with Callen et al. (2018) who document increases in doctor attendance from a system that highlights poorly performing districts in Pakistan to Executive District Officers and Dal Bó et al. (2018) who provide evidence that the superior local information of middle managers improves the targeting of monitoring interventions aimed at agricultural extension workers in Paraguay.

At the same time, the scale of errors made by officials does not systematically predict the service delivery indicators we have information on. This finding is consistent with Dhaliwal and Hanna (2017) in which detailed information on the absence rate of doctors provided to local officials in India has limited effects on service delivery. Together, these results highlight the need for more research on how the information of public officials and its equilibrium distribution in government relate to the delivery of public goods.

> The rest of this paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 details the approach we took to measuring information in the public sector. Section 3 presents detailed descriptives of the determinants of information

> 5The results echo those of Olken (2007) in which top-down government monitoring reduces corruption substantially more than grass-roots monitoring, Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2011) where effectively designed incentive schemes improved student learning outcomes far more than unconditional grants, and Pomeranz (2015) in which pre-existing incentives for tax compliance substitute for government audits.

> 6This paper also contributes to the literature on public sector decentralization. We provide direct empirical evidence that decentralized organizations have superior information, which is often assumed in the literature (Oates, 1999, 2005; Bardhan and Mookherjee, 2006). Our evidence implies that within layers of an organization, information is relatively homogeneous, while across organizational tiers it is relatively asymmetric. Our finding that the impact of decentralization on information is mediated by management practices provides one potential explanation for the divergent findings of the decentralization literature on service delivery (Bardhan, 2002; Crawford and Hartmann, 2008).

6