The WMS evaluation tool elicits management practices through a semi-structured interview covering 7 topics: flexibility, incentives, monitoring, roles, staff involvement, staffing, and targeting. Table A3 details each of the 19 management-related questions, by topic, as well as the 1-5 scoring grid used by our enumerators for each question. These questions provide a holistic assessment of practices related to the topic.<sup>12</sup> We take the ‘Management Practice: Monitoring’ index as a proxy for the organization’s value of the information acquired by officials and the ‘Management Practice: Other’ index, which aggregates the non-monitoring sub-topics of the WMS, as a measure of alignment.<sup>13</sup> The Appendix provides further details on how we constructed our management measures.

Figure A2 plots the distributions of the ‘Management Practice: Monitoring’ and ‘Management Practice: Other’ indices across the organizations we use in our core regressions.<sup>14</sup> Both indices exhibit substantial variation, indicating that de facto management practices vary substantially across the Ethiopian Public Service. For practices related to the organization’s value of the information acquired by officials, the 75th percentile organization has a ‘Management Practice: Monitoring’ score that is 141% higher than the 25th percentile organization. For practices related to the alignment of preferences of agents within an organization, the 75th percentile organization has a ‘Management Practices: Other’ score that is 135% higher than the 25th percentile organization. This variation occurs despite organizations operating under the same broad political environment, the same federal administration, sharing the same national history, and working under the same governing rules over budget allocations, wages, non-wage benefits, promotion schedules and other contracting arrangements. This variation across organizations is consistent with evidence from other management surveys of the public sector (Bloom et al., 2015; Rasul and Rogger, 2018; Rasul et al., 2018).

> 12To provide a sense of the holistic (rather than specific) nature of these questions, we go through one example: a question relating to management practices relating to monitoring was, “In what kind of ways does your Directorate track how well it is delivering services? Can you give me an example?” Enumerators could then score responses on a continuous 1-5 scale, where for indication the scoring grid described a score of one as corresponding to circumstances where the “Directorate does not track performance”; a score of three corresponded to, “Directorate tracks a number of performance indicators. These are seen and reviewed by senior management only”; and a score of five corresponded to, “Full set of indicators are tracked formally and continuously. Reviews are conducted regularly and involve representatives of all directorate staff groups. The results of the review are formally communicated to all staff.”

> 13These topics measure multiple aspects of management including staff involvement and incentives, all of which could be said to be means of aligning the preferences of agents to those of principals. For example, what are performance incentives but a mechanism for aligning agent action to the desires of principals?

> 14The ‘Monitoring’, and ‘Other’ indices are positively correlated with each other, with a coefficient of 0.62. Importantly, the partial correlations of these two dimensions of management can still be separately estimated from each other.

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