Command and Can't Control: An Evaluation of Centralized Accountability in the Public Sector

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By reducing information asymmetries across the hierarchy, the digitization of government services presents an opportunity for centralized management of frontline staff. In particular, high-frequency granular data can enable senior government officials to hold poorly performing members of the service delivery chain to account. To be effective, however, centralized management must translate large volumes of data into appropriate management actions. This paper studies this tension by evaluating a large-scale centralized accountability approach to managing education carried out at scale in Punjab, Pakistan. We find that a system that automatically identified poorly performing schools and jurisdictions for the attention of central management had no appreciable impact on the trajectory of school outcomes across any area of its focus. We contrast this result with the significant impact that frontline managers (head teachers) can have on school outcomes across the same areas and the potential for using centralized information systems to optimize the allocation of managerial talent across the public sector.