IFS/STICERD/UCL Development Work in Progress Seminar
Labor Misallocation and Public-Sector Performance
Andrea Smurra (Institute for Fiscal Studies)
Thursday 09 April 2026 14:00 - 15:00
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About this event
Leveraging personnel and intervention data from the Italian Fire and Rescue Service, we study how allocative frictions affect public sector performance. First, we document persistent delays in managerial turnover: retiring managers take months to be replaced. Second, exploiting delayed turnover and managerial rotations, we show that shortages of middle managers significantly slow interventions, while the absence of top managers has no short or long-run effects. Finally, we show that dispersion in marginal performance to pay is an observable sufficient statistic to evaluate labor misallocation in public organizations and estimate that intervention times are 9.3 percent longer than under the efficient allocation.
This seminar series is jointly organized by the IFS, STICERD, and UCL.
IFS/STICERD/UCL Development Economics Work In Progress seminars are held on Thursdays in term time at 14:00-15:00, at the IFS, unless specified otherwise.
Seminar organisers: Oriana Bandiera (STICERD, LSE), Imran Rasul (UCL), Britta Augsburg (IFS) and Jonathan Weigel (LSE).
For further information please contact Britta Augsburg: britta_a@ifs.org.uk.
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