Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:49:05am WEST
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Daily Overview |
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Egg-Timer: Transport and Environmental Policy Location: D-107 Session Chair: Moon Joon Kim, George Mason University Korea | |
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Bureaucracy and Political Bias: Evidence from Floods Columbia University, United States of America We study whether bureaucrats preemptively reflect the executive politician's preferences in their decisions. Combining novel administrative data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with hydrological models, we find that a standard deviation decrease in a county's alignment with the president leads to a 4 percentage point drop in the probability of bureaucrats flagging a county as requiring federal aid following an average-sized flooding event. This bias disappears in the most severe floods. We find evidence suggesting that such biases are significantly reduced when a career civil servant is overseeing the bureaucratic process rather than a political appointee. | |