suggestive evidence that our core results are not driven by reverse causality.

To understand the mechanisms driving this negative e↵ect, we then investigate four channels suggested by incentive theory through which the detrimental impacts of management practices related to incentives/monitoring for bureaucrats might occur. First, bureaucrats might need to multi-task in their work environment, needing to exert some types of e↵ort that can be labelled as ‘processing’ and does not directly increase project completion rates, while also needing to exert more productive types of e↵ort that do raise project completion rates. Our management practice measure might then capture an incentive system that places excessive regulatory burden or ‘red tape’ on bureaucrats that has been argued to cause bureaucrats to mis-allocate e↵ort towards processing activities [Kelman 1990, Baker 2002]. Consistent with this, we find the negative partial correlation between incentives/monitoring and project completion rates is even _more negative_ when bureaucrats need to coordinate/negotiate internally with other bureaucrats in their organization, or need to coordinate with external stakeholders.

Second, incentives/monitoring might crowd out the intrinsic motivation of bureaucrats. To investigate this, as part of our civil servants survey we measured the public service motivation (PSM) of bureaucrats, using an abbreviated version of the standard Perry scale [Perry 1996]. We find the negative impact of management practices related to incentives/monitoring are partly ameliorated when bureaucrats in the organization score higher on the PSM dimensions of ‘compassion’ and ‘public interest’. As in Ashraf _et al._ [2014], our evidence thus suggests incentives/monitoring _crowd-in_ the e↵ort of intrinsically motivated bureaucrats, partly (but not entirely) ameliorating the negative e↵ects of practices related to incentives/monitoring.

Third, management practices related to incentives/monitoring might be subject to _subjective_ performance evaluation (SPE). While SPE has the benefit of being based on a more holistic set of assessments, such subjective assessments also give rise to other biases and dysfunctional responses, especially the desire of agents to engage in influencing activities to curry favor with superiors [Milgrom 1988, Milgrom and Roberts 1988]. If so, the increased use of such mis-targeted incentives or key performance indicators can lead bureaucrats reallocating e↵ort towards non-productive tasks, _reducing_ project completion rates. We examine this hypothesis using two measures of the social connections between non-senior bureaucrats to their senior managers: whether they overlapped in time at university, and whether they belong to the same ethnic group. Along both dimensions of connectedness, we find the negative impact of incentives/monitoring on project completion becomes significantly worse.

Fourth, there might be specific project characteristics, such as the clarity of their target or output, that impact the ability of organizations to put together a well-designed set of incentive/monitoring practices. We find there is a far more detrimental impact of practices related to incentives/monitoring for projects that have poorly defined targets, that might well reflect incentive misalignment. On the clarity of the output to be delivered, we find the absolute impacts of both dimensions of management practice are far larger for projects with high output clarity. This 5