The longer-run performance effects of agencification: theory and evidence from Québec agencies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although governments worldwide are increasingly choosing to deliver services through organisations with greater autonomy than traditional bureaus, the implicit assumption that such agencification contributes to long-run efficiency remains largely untested. Agencification gives agency managers more autonomy and access to incentive mechanisms that lead to greater efficiency if they are not offset by inefficiencies resulting from managerial discretion. We test the hypothesis that agencification improves efficiency by examining the longer-run performance of 13 agencies in the province of Québec, Canada over approximately 10 years. We find that these agencies experienced long-term productivity gains, but that these gains reached a plateau over the time period studied. In addition, we describe changes in several measures of performance. A survey of the managers of these agencies indicates that they perceive agencification as having a substantive impact, but worry about the sustainability of autonomy and their capacity to show continued gains in measured performance over time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it