these changes, we present our preferred specification with these modifications in column 8 of Table A5. We see that the coefficient is -0.28, still significant at the usual levels though now at the 10% level.

Table 3 presents the results. In Column 1, we include the management indices, the manager dummy, and only those controls equivalent to our preferred specification in Table 2. We see that the coefficients on the management indices accord with theory exactly. Increasing the value an organization places on the use of information, proxied by the ‘Management Practices: Monitoring’ index, decreases errors substantially. The corresponding coefficient is -0.17, and the p-value 0.014. Similarly, the coefficient on the ‘Management Practices: Other’ index is 0.28, and has a p-value of 0.005. Managers continue to have information equivalent to their employees. These results are slightly strengthened by the inclusion of noise controls and proxies of the marginal cost of information acquisition, as described in column 2. Combining the indicator of de facto authority, the dummy for district government, and the management practices that proxy incentives leaves the qualitative results consistent with the theoretical literature. Once again, these results indicate the primacy of incentives for determining the distribution of information in the public sector.

In column 4 of Table 3, we undertake a first assessment of whether the impact of de facto authority varies by the nature of management practices. We include an interaction between the monitoring management practice index and the district government binary. It is negative, and large in magnitude relative to the baseline impact of de facto authority, but not significant at the usual levels, with a p-value of 0.17. However, we take this heterogeneity analysis further in Figure 4 by plotting the distribution of coefficients of the district government binary as we vary the decile of management practice. The figure makes clearer that the impact of de facto authority is clearly mediated by incentives. At the lowest levels of management practices observed in our setting, where incentives to acquire information are weakest, providing agents with de facto authority has zero impact on their relative magnitude of errors. At the highest level of management practices, the corresponding coefficient is -0.66 with a p-value of 0.04. These results imply that unconditional decentralization, without effective corresponding management practices or more broadly incentives for information acquisition, does not improve the information environment. This finding could help reconcile the divergent findings on the impact of decentralization on service delivery (documented in surveys such as Bardhan (2002) or Crawford and Hartmann (2008)), as management practices are typically not measured in such studies.<sup>28</sup>

> say regularly give you tasks as part of your formal work duties?”; and, the additional alignment index that complements our main measure.

> 28In the setting of our study, we do find evidence that management practices vary across tiers. Table A8 reports on organization-level regressions where our management indices are the dependent variables, the district government binary is the explanatory variable of interest, and a range of controls are presented. We find that once differences in individual characteristics and sector fixed effects are conditioned on, the coefficient on district government is large (0.41) and significant at the 5% level, indicating that on average, district governments have more of a culture of monitoring. This finding is strengthened once we condition on differences in the marginal cost of information acquisition. We also find weaker evidence

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