State Capacity as an Organizational Problem
研究了降低中央监控成本的技术如何推动国家从世袭制小国向大型官僚组织转型，利用美国19世纪铁路网扩张作为监控成本变化的工具变量，发现旅行时间缩短显著增加了联邦政府存在概率，并减少了世袭特征。
Abstract We investigate how technologies that reduce the costs of monitoring by central authorities have shaped the historical transition from small patrimonial states to large bureaucratic organizations. Our analysis is based on a novel dataset that traces changes in the organizational structure and geographic presence of the U.S. federal government over the nineteenth century. To identify causal effects, we develop a new identification strategy that exploits the expansion of the railroad network as a source of variation in the travel time–and thus monitoring costs–between Washington D.C. and other locations. We present three main findings. First, reductions in travel time to Washington D.C. significantly increased the likelihood of federal government presence in a location. Second, this effect is stronger for occupations and tasks characterized by more severe agency problems. Third, decreases in travel time to Washington D.C. are associated with a decline in patrimonial features of the federal government in the location, in line with enhanced monitoring capacity reducing dependence on personal trust and connections.