remaining Columns show similar partial correlations of both dimensions of management practice with project initiation (Column 5) and the continuous measure of project completion rate (Column 6). On magnitudes, taking our preferred specification (1) shown in Column 3, a one standard deviation increase in management practices related to CS-autonomy increases the likelihood a project is initiated by 25%, and it increases the likelihood it is fully completed by 28%; a one standard deviation increase in management practices related to CS-incentives/monitoring decreases the likelihood a project is initiated by 28%, and it decreases the likelihood it is fully completed by 18%. These magnitudes are of economic as well as statistical significance: recall the backdrop here is that 21% of projects are never started and only 34% are fully completed.<sup>13</sup> Our core finding thus confirms the two dimensions of management practice emphasized by the public administration and economics literatures do indeed robustly correlate to e↵ective public service delivery in the Ghanaian context. The positive correlation of CS-autonomy with project completion supports the notion bureaucracies could delegate some decision making to civil servants, relying on their professionalism and resolve to deliver public services. The evidence is less supportive of the notion that when bureaucrats have more agency, they are more likely to pursue their own, potentially corrupt, objectives that diverge from societal interests. We return to the issue below, when we discuss the interplay between management and corruption in service.

The _negative_ partial correlation between project completion rates and management practices related to the provision of incentives and monitoring of bureaucrats, runs counter to a body of evidence from private sector settings. As described earlier, evidence on the impacts of performancerelated incentives in _public_ sector settings is mixed (and often based on frontline workers or streetlevel bureaucrats) [Perry _et al._ 2009, Banerjee _et al._ 2014, Khan _et al._ 2018]. Moreover, Finan _et al._ [2017] review the evidence base on the impacts of monitoring in public organizations, including studies highlighting how this can often lead to gaming/circumventing monitoring systems. Our findings reinforce the evidence base suggesting the possibility that management practices related to incentives and monitoring negatively correlate to outputs of the professional tier of civil service _bureaucrats_ across contexts.

Appendix Table A2 provides a battery of checks on our baseline estimates. These show the results to be robust to alternative codings of completion rates, samples, estimation methods, and fixed e↵ects specifications.<sup>14</sup> Appendix Table A3 further shows the results to be robust to

> 13Given the management practices are positively correlated to each other, this also implies that only controlling for incentives/monitoring leads _γ_ b2 to be biased upwards as CS-autonomy is omitted. Similar biases arise from a traditional public administration perspective that might only focus on the provision of autonomy.

14More precisely, we first redefine project completion rates to be the average of the codings of the two enumerators designated to each progress report. The result in Column 2 shows the baseline results continue to hold even when we reduce the variation in completion rates this way. Column 3 excludes projects implemented by the largest organization in terms of number of projects; Column 4 excludes the five smallest organizations by number of projects. Columns 5 and 6 exclude organizations at the top and bottom of the CS-autonomy and CS-incentives/monitoring management scales respectively. Column 7 uses only the 30 organizations for whom we have coded project completion data for, to define the management z-scores (and so does not define the z-scores based on all 45 organizations for which these scores are available based on our civil servant survey). Column 8 reports the result of estimation 15