New Paper on “Building Capacity in the Public Administration” [17.07.25]
Nadja Dwenger (Chair of Public Economics) und Anna Gumpert (University of Tuebingen) share their latest research „Building Capacity in the Public Administration: Evidence from German Reunification“.
Graphics: Dwenger/Gumpert
Effective public administration is a cornerstone of state capacity and economic prosperity. We examine a key tool for building administrative capacity: seconding officials from high-capacity to low-capacity public administrations.
Our study focuses on the post-reunification efforts to build administrative capacity in East Germany’s tax offices. Thanks to unique institutional features, we can isolate variation in secondments that’s exogenous to local conditions — allowing us to deliver the first causal estimates of the short- and long-term effects of capacity-building on tax office performance
