‘knowledge-seeking’ activities (proxied by downloads from and visits to a particular website). The finance literature measures the (‘soft’) information held by loan officers at lending institutions. The measures of soft information are either elicited from survey questions that ask directly the extent to which employees feel that they know borrower characteristics (Uchida et al, 2012; Hattori et al, 2015), the predictive power of internal risk ratings relative to ‘hard’ measurable characteristics of firms (Agarwal and Hauswal, 2009, 2010; Brown et al, 2012; Qian et al 2015; Agarwal and Ben-David, 2018, Dal Bo et al, 2018), or measures of the effort exerted by relationship managers to learn about their clients (Liberti, 2018).

We show descriptively that providing officials with de facto control over their tasks improves the precision of their claims about constituents by a third of a standard deviation. This accords with corresponding theoretical predictions (Aghion and Tirole, 1997; Garicano, 2000; Dessein, 2002) and uses the fact that the Ethiopian government is organized around multiple tiers of government offices to proxy the delegation of de facto authority across tiers. By limiting our comparisons to claims about the same indicator, at the same percentile of its distribution, for the same district, and controlling for individual factors such as education and experience, we are able to provide the most precise descriptive evidence to date on the relationship between delegation and information (Acemoglu et al., 2007; Aghion et al., 2017).<sup>2</sup> Similarly, the value assigned to the use of information within an organization mediates the impacts of the delegation of authority (Gant et al., 2002; Mookherjee, 2006). In those organizations that have weak incentives for information acquisition, the delegation of authority may have limited impact since there is little impetus for actors to use it. Using measures of management practices as a proxy for organizational incentives, we find that the delegation of de facto authority has a positive effect on the acquisition of information only when the appropriate management practices are in place. District officials working in those organizations with the weakest management practices related to monitoring are no more informed than their central colleagues. This implies that local officials are not always better informed, as often assumed in the literature on optimal delegation and decentralization (Oates, 1999; Bardhan, 2002), but are better informed only if there are appropriate incentives in place for information acquisition.

Building on this descriptive work, we experimentally investigate whether the accuracy of bureaucratic beliefs can be improved by evidence briefings that are a frequent means by which government or academic research is communicated to public officials. Such briefings have long been used within public service but are increasingly a focus of research entities such as the Centre for Economic Policy Research, JPAL/IPA, and the World Bank Group. For example, the number of evidence briefings produced per year by the Campbell Collaboration, a focal coordinator in the “use of systematic reviews and other evidence synthesis

> 2The variation in the precision of public officials’ estimates does not seem to be mediated by basic personal characteristics, such as an official’s education or experience, or by their proximity to the local environment we are questioning them on. Demographic variables and proxies of the remoteness of the officials from their constituents do not explain a substantial proportion of the variation in errors.

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