Bureaucratic personnel policy influences agency performance by affecting both the types of bureaucrats who are selected for employment and the actions that bureaucrats take. An effective policy selects intrinsically motivated bureaucrats for promotion or retention and provides incentives for bureaucrats to exert a high level of effort. I investigate a retention and promotion policy used in a number of U.S. government agencies in which only a previously specified percentage of bureaucrats in a cohort are retained after one period. The proportion of bureaucrats retained after a review is referred to as a “selection rate”. Using a formal model, I show that the adoption of a selection rate facilitates the separation of intrinsically motivated and unmotivated bureaucrats where they would otherwise pool, allowing bureaucratic personnel managers to screen out unmotivated bureaucrats. Effective screening by itself, however, is not welfare-enhancing because screening removes unmotivated bureaucrats’ incentives to exert effort. Compared to alternative welfare-reducing screening mechanisms which bring about screening through monitoring or wage policy, selection rates facilitate welfare-enhancing screening by inducing motivated types to exert additional effort in order to distinguish themselves from unmotivated bureaucrats. I find that selection rates are most effective where material or ego rents from government employment are high and where the policy rewards that motivated bureaucrats realize are low. These properties of selection rates explain their adoption in several U.S. government agencies’ personnel systems, most notably the military officer corps.

中文翻译：

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选拔率和官僚表现

官僚人事政策通过影响被选择就业的官僚类型和官僚采取的行动来影响代理绩效。有效的政策选择有内在动机的官僚去晋升或留任，并激励官僚付出高水平的努力。我调查了许多美国政府机构使用的保留和晋升政策，这些政策在一个时期后仅保留了队列中以前指定比例的官僚。审查后保留的官僚比例被称为“选拔率”。通过使用正式模型，我表明采用选择率有助于将内在动机和无动机的官僚分离，否则他们将汇集在一起​​，允许官僚人事管理人员筛选出没有动力的官僚。但是，有效的筛查本身并不能提高福利，因为筛查消除了无心的官僚施加努力的动力。与通过监控或工资政策进行筛查的替代性减少福利筛查机制相比，选择率通过诱使有动机的人做出更多努力以使自己与无动机的官僚区分开来促进增强福利的筛查。我发现，在政府就业产生的物质或自我租金高且激励官僚意识到的政策奖励低的地方，选择率最有效。选择率的这些特性说明了它们在美国多个政府机构的人事系统中的采用，