# **1 Introduction**

The information that public officials use to make decisions determines the distribution of public resources and the efficacy of public policy (Callen et al., 2018; Dal Bó et al., 2018). Errors in that information can reduce social welfare as the marginal efficiency of public investments falls. Correspondingly, policyrelated research frequently attempts to improve the information set of public officials and thereby raise the efficiency of policy.<sup>1</sup> Despite the importance of bureaucratic beliefs for citizen welfare, there is an absence of empirical evidence on the accuracy of information used in public sector decision-making. This paper develops a measurement framework for assessing the accuracy of a set of fundamental bureaucratic beliefs and provides descriptive evidence on their determinants. We then provide experimental evidence on the possibility of improving the accuracy of those beliefs through the provision of evidence briefings, akin to those used by actors inside and outside the public service to inform public officials.

More precisely, we develop a survey that extracts the beliefs of public officials about the key variables on which their work depends, such as the size of the population they are serving or sector-specific variables such as the number of primary-age children who are in school. We compare the responses of the surveyed officials to objective benchmark data from administrative and survey data to calculate the scale of errors that these officials make. We thus provide among the first large-scale descriptive evidence on the nature and correlates of information in the public sector.

We combine these measures with information about the structure of the hierarchy in which public officials work and the management practices they operate under to show that our descriptive results closely mirror a series of core theoretical predictions regarding the distribution of information in the public sector. Information acquisition in bureaucratic hierarchy is theoretically distinctive to models of learning by autonomous agents. Unlike markets, bureaucracies do not have organic information creation mechanisms, such that individual officials must undertake costly actions to acquire and absorb information. As bureaucratic decision-making is based on team production and decision-making, officials face the threat of being over-ruled by their superiors and an incentive to free ride on the information acquisition of other bureaucrats (Argenziano et al., 2016; Di Pei, 2015; Stiglitz, 2017). Our empirical results closely match the predictions of this theoretical literature.

> 1This is an explicitly stated aim of many important economics research centres such as: the US-focused Bipartisan Policy Center’s Evidence-Based Policymaking Initiative, which provides “advice and expertise on implementation options and strategies ... as Congress develops legislation and as the Executive Branch devises regulations, policies, and standards to improve the generation of high level, quality evidence.”; the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) that “initiates, funds and coordinates research activities and communicates the results quickly and effectively to decision makers around the world.”; the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) which is “a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence.”; and the World Bank, that “generates high-quality and operationally relevant data and research to transform development policy”.

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