Categorization in Labor Markets: Evidence from the Indian Administrative Service

John-Paul Ferguson Sharique Hasan

Draft: Please do not cite or circulate without permission of the authors.

Abstract In this article, we study the career effects of getting diverse versus specialized experience. Existing research on social categorization in labor markets has found that specialized experience is privileged in external labor markets. That research has suggested that in internal labor markets characterized by managerial rotation, generalists should not be penalized. We examine the relationship between specialized experience and career outcomes using rich longitudinal data on the careers of Indian Administrative Service Ofcers, members of the Republic of Indias elite bureaucratic organization. Contrary to prior theory, our results show that diversied experience is penalized at both early and late career stages. We theorize that the differentiation of jobs is sufcient to introduce bias in favor of specialists even in the presence of full information and collective norms that favor generalists.

Introduction

A frequent nding in recent work on social categorization is that actors who are diversied who have partial memberships in many categories, however denedfare worse than actors who are specialized (Zuckerman 1999, Hannan, Polos & Carroll 2007, Negro, Kocak & Hsu 2010). The stream of this research that has focused on labor markets (Zuckerman, Kim, Ukanwa & von Rittman 2003, Zuckerman 2005, Leung 2010) has found similar results: a person who specializes in one type of work fares better in getting subsequent and better jobs than a person who does not. This research has focused on external labor markets and theorized the scope conditions under which specialists would do better than generalists. An implication of these scope conditions is that there are other types of labor markets where generalists should fare better. Specically, in internal labor markets that use some form of managerial rotation (Thomas Jr. 1961, Osterman 1987, Lincoln 1992), accumulating diverse work experiences should be seen by evaluators as an asset rather than a liability (Zuckerman 2005). Such labor markets are not rare. Indeed many large organizations, ranging from General Electric and Sony to the World Bank and the United States Civil Service, use and advocate managerial rotation as a means to produce talented leaders with a broad perspective that takes in their organizations diverse operations. There are empirical as well as theoretical reasons to investigate whether and how such systems reward diverse and specialized career experience. In this article we study one such internal labor market: the Indian Administrative Service or IAS, the elite civil service of the Republic of India. The IAS is an exceptionally useful site for studying these questions, for it has institutional features that allow us to get around four empirical problems that bedevil the work on categorization in labor markets. First, how often a person changes work experience is often correlated with unobserved ability. Yet members of the IAS are chosen through an extraordinarily rigorous screening process that limits the resulting variation in individual ability. We also have detailed data on IAS ofcers human capital upon their admission to the service. Second, people have differing propensities to changing jobs, which may correlate with their ability. IAS ofcers though are moved not per their own preferences but to ll vacancies elsewhere

in the bureaucracy. Third, accumulating different work experiences is often associated with having different career goals, and so specialist and generalist performance are not directly comparable. By contrast, IAS ofcers whatever their experience have comparable career goals that center around key promotions. Fourth and nally, genuinely diverse experience typically makes an individual less likely to appear in any single data set and thus contributes to survivor bias. The IAS however has life tenure, and we can observe virtually all ofcers from when they leave school and join the service until their retirement. These features, combined with IASs formal commitment to producing generalist managers, make the IAS ideal for evaluating the theorized ability of managerial rotation systems to favor generalists. Yet contrary to theoretical predictions, even in this extremely favorable setting we nd evidence that IAS ofcers who get diverse rather than specialized experience early in their careers are less likely to be promoted to New Delhi or to become joint secretaries. The penalties associated with diversication persist in the face of controls for other social mechanisms, such as human capital, ascriptive differences, and homophily. We even observe such penalties in models that include individual xed effects and thus allow us to control for any remaining unobserved variation in ability among IAS ofcers. These results suggest that reducing information asymmetries (Spence 1973) and instilling collective norms that favor diversicationthe characteristics of such internal labor markets that are theorized to make them more favorable toward generalistsis not sufcient to eliminate the bias toward specialists. Accordingly, we sketch a more detailed model of how social categorization operates in labor markets with programs of managerial rotation. We propose that such labor markets must be understood as instilling and requiring a mix of rm-specic and jobspecic skills (Becker 1962). The need for rm-specic skills in each job means that there is an incentive to give managers some diversied experience, but the need for job-specic skills means that there is also an incentive to choose a manager with more experience in the focal job. Thus the job-specic requirements in the structure of demand should be sufcient to induce bias toward specialists even in the presence of full information and collective norms that favor generalists. We postulate that it is the differentiation of job 4

opportunities themselves (Stewman 1986) that biases evaluators toward specialists in this context. We stress that such evaluator decisions do not imply bad faith or a disconnect between the IASs organizational goals and managers incentives. Favoring an IAS ofcer who is relatively more specialized does not contradict the IASs mission, but in aggregate such decisions mean that we might give IAS ofcers individual career advice that does. We conclude by discussing some implications of this study for the research on social classication in labor markets.

Careers and diversication

Categorization has been an active research area in the sociology of organizations for more than a decade (see Lounsbury & Rao (2004) and Negro, Kocak & Hsu (2010) for reviews). That work has found penalties that accrue to those persons and organizations that have identities that span socially legitimated categories, in diverse settings. In this study, we focus on the stream of research that has been done on the processes of categorization in labor markets (Zuckerman et al. 2003, Zuckerman 2005, Leung 2010). The research on categorization in labor markets has focused on the so-called typecasting problem. Because the quality of potential workers is hard to discern and because the only available information often consists of peoples past work experience, evaluators face a dilemma: they would like to hire workers who are skilled at many things, but cannot distinguish those workers from those who are unskilled at anything. They satisce by hiring workers who have demonstrated experience in one thing, as a way to minimize the downside risk of worker quality. Because evaluators take such actions, workers face strong pressures to create easily understandable identities by specializing in particular types of work (Zuckerman et al. 2003). The typecasting problem was formulated in the context of external labor markets. Two features of an external labor market are salient to typecasting. First, the matching process in an external labor market is characterized by information asymmetry: neither candidate nor evaluator can judge the others quality before the match. Second, matches are costly, and both parties want to minimize the risk of a poor match and its associated

costs (Zuckerman 2005). These two features combine to reduce the amount of experimentation that workers and employers are willing to engage in. An implication of these scope conditions on the typecasting problem is that if information about candidates were better and if the costs of bad matches were smaller, there would be less typecasting. Evaluators could use direct information about quality rather than inferring it from work histories, and workers could thus accumulate diverse experiences. For instance, Zuckerman (2005) contrasted the likely fate of feature-lm actors with diverse genre experiences in two labor-market regimes, the older system and the modern independent-agent system. The studio systems internal labor markets, he theorized, should be more congenial to diversication: The key factor in this regard is [that] the sinking of costs in a semi-permanent staff creates a stimulus for experimentation in an internal labor market that has no parallel in an external labor market. Indeed, beyond the lm industry, it is useful to consider rms that have management-training programs that groom generalist managerial skills by placing [managers] in a variety of industries and/or regions. Such programs create career lines (e.g., a General Electric manager might work in such varied industries as plastics; industrial diamonds; appliances; medical devices; and broadcasting at various points in his career) that are vanishingly rare in the external labor market, where hiring is typically governed by a typecasting process according to which employers (or the executive recruiters who represent them) look rst for candidates who have worked in the industry in question. A direct test of the salience of such a stimulus for generalism must await data that are better suited for such an analysis (P. 32, Emphasis added). We disagree with none of these points. However, consider such an internal labor market. Firms like General Electric do not hire managers for single tasks, the way actors are hired. Instead people are hired into the organization, with the expectation that they can perform many, possibly unrelated, tasks. Insofar as the person is hired with the expectation that he or she will work multiple jobs, the organization assumes the cost of a bad match between the person and any single job. This should make the person and their evaluators more willing to experiment in different kinds of work. Accordingly, new managers can be placed almost anywhere in the organization for their rst assignment. Consider the second assignment, though. An evaluator who is attempting to ll a position in a specic industry or function faces a pool of candidates. Assume for the 6

moment that all the candidates are of equal quality, and that the evaluator knows that they are of equal qualitythis after all is what such an internal labor market is supposed to be good for. The candidates differ though in the amount of experience that they have accumulated in the industry or function where the vacancy exists. It seems reasonable to assume that the evaluator would, ceteris paribus, prefer those candidates who had more focal experience. We suggest this thought experiment to make a simple point: removing information asymmetry and the costs of poor matches are insufcient conditions to eliminate the bias toward specialists. This occurs because, unless all managerial discretion disappears, at each subsequent stage evaluators will have an incentive to prefer the candidates who have accumulated more experience in the focal category. This is not to say that the system will degenerate into one where all candidates are specialized. If for example there is any systematic rotation of managers between jobs (and in managerial-rotation systems, there is), there will still be a mix of managers with narrow and broad experience. There are also often reasons why evaluators would want to see some diversication among candidates otherwise the rationale for building such an internal labor market in the rst place is incoherent. It is to say rather that those candidates who are relatively more specialized in industries or functions where there are vacancies are more likely to be chosen to ll those vacancies. This implies that the collective norm encouraging generalists can still be violated in the aggregate. We draw two empirical implications from this line of reasoning. The rst is that specialization will be rewarded and diversication will be penalized, even in labor markets that have managerial rotation. A second implication is that the match between the skills that a candidate specializes in and the skills required by the vacancy should matter. This is in contrast to the idea that specialization is merely a signal for unobservable ability (Zuckerman et al. 2003, Hsu 2006, Hsu, Hannan & Kocak 2009) rather, than a reection of specic skills. If specialization is merely a signal, then the subsequent allocation of people into vacancies should not be driven by a match between their skills and the jobs requirements. Testing these implications requires data not just on an internal labor market but on one with some specic features that help us deal with empirical issues that confound the 7

effects of specialization. First and foremost, we want to limit unobserved heterogeneity in ability among the candidates. Ideally a setting would have strong selection criteria that limit the range of the ability distribution from which candidates are drawn, and the data would have further meaningful indicators of ability along many dimensions. Second, rotation of managers should be an institutional norm. Third, the specic rotation should be exogenous to the candidates own desires. This is to reduce the confounding effect of self-selection. Fourth, candidates should face comparable career hurdlescomparable in that they are equivalent positions and that the consideration set for lling those positions is also equivalent. Fifth, exit from the data set should be uncorrelated with diversication, to limit the risk of survivor bias. Below we describe data that has all ve of these features: the careers of the ofcers in the Indian Administrative Service.

Careers in the Indian Administrative Service

Since its formation in 1946, the IAS has been considered one of if not the most prestigious careers in India. The IAS consists of several thousand men and women who are recruited through a highly competitive annual examination process. A New York Times article describes the selection process, perhaps the most competitive in the world: More than 200,000 people take the rst phase of the examinations, a number that is winnowed down to some 12,000 when the nal exam is held six months later. Of those, only 2,000 or so will be invited to an interview, and then only about 80 people will be offered posts with the service. . . (Gargan 1993). Once admitted, ofcers enjoy lifelong tenure. IAS ofcers follow a standard career ladder. Most receive some formal training at the National Academy of Administration in Massoorie. Ofcers are then assigned to a cadre, or state.1 Virtually all are rst posted as sub-magistrates who manage the taxes and other affairs of a small district (in our data, such experience is coded as Land Revenue Management & District Administration). Junior IAS ofcer work includes enforcing laws or managing local development projects. Once they are promoted to the
the most part, the IASs assignment cadres correspond to Indias states. Several of the very small states in the northeast and the union territories however are grouped into single cadres.
1 For

senior pay-scale, ofcers are posted in sundry positions that include managing districts, public enterprises, and government ministries. In each post, ofcers gain experience in substantive areas such as nance, rural development, or human resource management. The specialization of an IAS ofcers experience can vary widely. Because the IAS is a generalist organization, ofcers are rotated through many ministries. During each posting, ofcers acquire one of several dozen major experiences, such as rural development, nance, or forestry. Changes in postings occur at xed intervals and most ofcers switch experiences frequently. The rate at which IAS ofcers move between postings has remained steady throughout the services existence. Scholars have observed that IAS ofcers in the 1980s changed postings as frequently as did their predecessors in the Indian Civil Services, the IASs British colonial equivalent. This rate of change continues today (Krishna 2010, Potter 1986). Due to the frequency of transfers, the accumulated experience of IAS ofcers can display signicant variety. Qualitative evidence suggests that ofcers superiors rotate them with little concern for their specialization, particularly early in their career. Postings are primarily made according to the needs of the bureaucracy, the ofcers location on the seniority scale and the availability of vacancies at that level. Therefore junior IAS ofcers have almost no say in where their next posting will be. An IAS ofcer is supposed to be a generalist who through a variety of postings acquires a broad skill set that makes them a more effective administrator. Mishra (2001), in describing the generalist nature of the Indian Administrative Service, says: The civil service is dominated by generalists and the basic philosophy guiding its initial setting up, and later its continuation, advocates the belief that civil servants have to face any challenge posed them. Consequently, they should have the general skills to exploit and manoeuvre for problem solving. Within this generalist approach, there has been an effort to allow civil servants in the central Government to specialize in certain areas. However, more frequently than ever, civil servants are given assignments without regard to their specialization (Mishra 2001, pg. 123). Most IAS promotions are nearly automatic. The IAS pay scale and job hierarchy follow a classic civil-service model wherein ofcers receive regular raises and titular promotions based on their tenure. By default, such promotions take place in an ofcers 9

assigned cadre. There are however two types of promotions that also convey status and the prospect of advancement into the highest echelons of the service. It is these nonautomatic promotions, known as Centre postings and empanelment, on which we focus. After their fourth year in the service, ofcers may begin to compete for a deputation to a central government post in New Delhi, known as the Centre. Ofcers who are on central deputation join ministries senior staffs and play a larger role in formulating policy. Most IAS ofcers seek a central posting because it gives them exposure to national-level policymaking and is considered an important career milestone (Shurmer-Smith 1998). More than one third of IAS ofcers never receive such a posting. For those who do secure a Centre posting, promotion to Joint Secretary in the Central Government, or empanelment, is the next milestone. The Government of Indias Department of Personnel and Training denes empanelment as the process of assessing the suitability for appointment at the level of Joint Secretary and above as well as equivalent posts in the Government of India (Department of Personnel and Training 2007a). Promotion to joint secretary is highly competitive and a prerequisite for becoming a Secretary to the Government of India, the highest bureaucratic position in the country. High performance in previous postings is a necessary but by no means sufcient condition for empanelment. The Department of Personnel and Training, in their Empanelment Guidelines, justies empanelment in these terms: Empanelment should be considered not as a reection of the intrinsic merit or otherwise of an ofcer but the suitability of an ofcer to occupy senior levels in the Central Government. Given the background and experience of an ofcer, she or he may be highly suited to occupy senior positions in State Government. Likewise, another ofcer, in view of the background and experience, may be considered more suitable for Central Government posts (Department of Personnel and Training 2007b). An empanelment selection committee is required by statute to evaluate all ofcers who are eligible for empanelment; that is, there is no self-selection into bidding for these positions. The committee evaluates candidates based on information in those candidates Annual Condential Reports (ACR). The ACR includes career histories, background information, and evaluations by the ofcers superiors at each stage. According to the

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Department of Personnels documentation, qualities such as general reputation, merit, competence, leadership and a air for participating in the policy making process to recommend the list of ofcers to be included in the panel are looked upon favorably (Department of Personnel and Training 2007b). All of these institutional features guide our identication strategy. First, the IAS itself controls for the ability of the ofcers through its rigorous selection system. IAS ofcers are among the brightest men and women in India, and as such, their variation in underlying skill is minimal compared to more uid labor markets. Second, the dossiers of IAS ofcers exhibit signicant exogenous variation in the accumulation of major experiences, especially at the earlier stages of their career. The variation results from the needs of the bureaucracy and the idiosyncratic appearance of vacancies than from their own desire to specialize. What is more, despite this range of jobs, IAS ofcers have common career goals: promotion from the states to the Centre, then later empanelment as joint secretaries (and ultimately as secretaries). For our purposes, the IAS can be thought of as a system that sifts through the population to identify individuals with comparable, high ability; assigns those individuals careers that vary in the diversity of the constituent experiences; and evaluates those individuals for a common set of rewards. The key feature behind this strategy is that the diversity of an IAS ofcers experience can be thought of as exogenously determined and randomly assigned, conditional on other observed characteristics. A nal important feature of the IAS is that non-retirement exits from the service are extremely rare. The vast majority of ofcers remain in the service until they retire. Unlike many other labor markets, survivor bias is not a signicant issue here. Table 1 compares the total number of regular recruitment ofcers in our data and the total number of IAS ofcers recruited in that year from 1995 until 2008 (we explain regular recruitment below). More than 96 percent of the ofcers who were recruited into the IAS starting in 1980 appear in our data. [Table 1 about here.]

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Data and Empirical Approach

4.1 Data
We assembled data from the administrative records of the 4,259 Indian Administrative Ofcers who began their careers between 1974 and 2008. Individuals can enter the IAS through two different routes. Seventy-three percent of our sample entered through regular recruitment, the competitive examination process described above. Regular recruits begin their careers in their mid to late twenties as junior ofcers. The remaining 37 percent entered via promotion from a state civil service.2 Such promotees enter the IAS much later in their career, immediately begin working in a specialized posting, and are not eligible for Centre postings. We thus exclude promotee IAS ofcers from our analysis. The risk set for promotion to New Delhi therefore consists of the 3,122 ofcers who entered through regular recruitment, who together contribute 420,676 monthly observations. When we model empanelment, we consider the subset of these ofcers who received a Centre posting at some point. These 1,220 ofcers3 contribute 139,075 postpromotion, pre-empanelment monthly observations. Our empirical strategy is to understand the effect of variation in career experience on the likelihood that an IAS ofcer clears two critical promotion hurdles. The rst hurdle is the rst posting to a central-government post in New Delhi. The second is whether a promoted ofcer is later empaneled as a Joint Secretary to the Government of India. We describe variables relevant to each of these hurdles below.

4.2 Posting to the Centre

Dependent variable: We model promotion to the Centre as the rst transition from a statelevel posting to a posting in New Delhi. In our data, we observe 2,083 transitions to the Centre by regular-recruitment ofcers, for a promotion rate of 66.7 percent. Because
2 The coexistence of state civil services alongside the IAS, many of whose ofcers serve in the states, can be confusing. Unlike the United States, which often has parallel agencies at the state and federal level with separate hierarchies, IAS ofcers typically work in the states overseeing employees who are themselves members of the states civil service. 3 These ofcers all entered the IAS before 1 January 1990. As of 31 December 2008, when our data end, no member of a cohort that entered the IAS after 1989 had been promoted to joint secretary. The statistical routines we use drop cohorts whose outcomes are perfectly predicted by their cohort xed effect.

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transitions in postings occur monthly, we model promotion based on individual-month observations. Independent variables: We observe each ofcers complete career history since their entry into the IAS. Each posting includes information on whether the ofcer was employed in the Centre or in the states, their seniority level, the start- and end-dates for the posting and the major experience that they acquired during the spell. To construct our main independent variable, we calculate the degree of specialization in major experiences using a Herndahl index. For each individual i in each time period t we observe the number of months the individual has previously worked in one of forty experiences m. These experiences and the distribution of monthly experience for all individuals in our sample among these majors are described in Table 2. We calculate the individuals shares in experience at each time period. We denote Simt as the total months in each experience within t months of experience in the IAS, Sit . The Herndahl score Hit is then calculated by summing the squared shares of all major experiences through time period t for each individual i. ( Simt Sit )2

Hit =

Herndahl indices can range from 0 to 1. Smaller scores indicate greater variety in major experience while larger scores imply increased specialization. We postulate that there will be a positive relationship between specialization and promotion to New Delhi. To avert any bias introduced by the skewness of the Herndahl index, our estimations use the natural log of the Herndahl score as our measure of specialization (our results are substantially unchanged if the raw index is used). [Table 2 about here.] By construction the Herndahl index tracks both the absolute number of different types of experience as well as the number of months (as a share of the total) spent in each. At the same time, the Herndahl does not track how many moves between jobs were made in accumulating those shares. Our goal is to interpret the Herndahl index as as pure a measure of non-systematic variation as possible. We therefore want to be 13

sure that our measure neither simply reects nor ignores these systematic aspects of the Herndahls construction. Accordingly, while we focus on the coefcients estimated for the index, we also include and discuss variables that track the number of moves ofcers have made, their depth of experience in specic types of work and other elements of the IAS ofcers career. Control variables: We include a substantial set of control variables to account for other sources of heterogeneity among the ofcers that may affect their rst transition into a Centre posting. First, we control for the number of academic degrees that an ofcer holds. More highly educated ofcers should have better skills and knowledge. Humancapital theory predicts that these factors should increase opportunities and thus should increase the likelihood of promotion (Becker 1962). We also account for the academic performance of the ofcer in their rst degree by including a variable indicating whether the ofcer graduated in the rst division of their class. Increasing evidence in economics suggests that college major is an important factor in determining wages in the labor market (Black, Haviland, Sanders & Taylor 2006). We know the college and graduate major of each IAS ofcer. Thus the models include two types of college- or graduate-degree major controls. The rst set are dummy variables indicating whether the ofcers major was engineering, humanities, medicine, professional, science, business or law (the omitted, largest category is social science). The second control is the count of the different subjects that the ofcers majored in across their various degrees. The number of different subjects is included for two reasons. On the one hand, it is a measure of interdisciplinary education, which may benet generalists like IAS ofcers. On the other hand, it may reect a pre-existing preference for variety in experience. Human-capital theory also suggests that work experience affects job performance and outcomes (Becker 1962, Quiones, Ford & Teachout 1995). Since the IAS is usually the rst and only career for most regular-recruitment ofcers, our data represent their complete career histories. To measure experience, we control for the number of prior postings and its square for each ofcer in each time period. We expect an inverted-U shaped relationship between number of postings and the probability of being promoted to the Centre. Two reasons exist for expecting a non-linear relationship. First, junior ofcers 14

cannot access Centre postings until they have at least four years of tenure in the IAS. After this period, the likelihood of a Centre posting should increase as experience increases. However, since promotion to the center is not guaranteed for all ofcers, we expect that the likelihood of promotion should decrease for more experienced ofcers who are not promoted within a reasonable time window. India is composed of several distinct regional and ethnic groups that serve important functions in Indian work and social life. Membership in a linguistic group offers an important source of shared identity and consequently a useful network of contacts (Portes 1998). We expect that ofcers who speak a dominant Indian language, and are thus associated with that identity, can leverage that identity. Thus, we expect membership in such a group to increase the chances of promotion to the Centre. Our models include control variables indicating whether ofcers speak Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil. Speakers of these ve languages constitute 69.2 percent of the Indian population and 77 percent of the ofcers entering the IAS through regular recruitment. Our data include two basic demographic characteristics of ofcers: their age and their gender. We expect that age, like experience, should exhibit an inverted-U shaped relationship with promotion rates. We also include a control variable for gender (Ridgeway & Correll 2004). Given the paucity of research on gender and labor-market outcomes in India, particularly in the government bureaucracy, we do not have bases for making directional predictions. We also control for the ofcers tenure in the IAS, in months. Finally, our sample is composed of ofcers who were recruited into the IAS in different years and were assigned to different state cadres. To address the possibility that careers vary by era and by the states in which the careers unfold, we include xed effects for the ve-year cohort to which the IAS ofcers belong (e.g., 1970-1974 or 1985-1989; estimates are robust to yearly cohort dummies), the cadre to which they have been allocated and the calendar year. All estimates therefore explicitly control for any unobserved heterogeneity between cohorts, states and years. Summary statistics for this analysis are presented in Table 3. [Table 3 about here.]

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4.3 Empanelment as Joint Secretary

Dependent variable: We examine whether ofcers promoted to the Centre were subsequently empaneled. We focus on the 1,220 ofcers who entered the IAS between 1794 and 1989 and were ever promoted to the Centre. Of these, 407 or about one third were subsequently empaneled. We model the process of empanelment using logistic regression with individual-month observations. Independent variables: For each of the focal individuals in our sample we compute two measures of specialization, representing two distinct periods in the ofcers career. The rst, early specialization, is the ofcers cumulative major-experience Herndahl index of from their entry into the IAS until the time they were rst promoted to New Delhi. This variable measures the degree to which the early postings of an ofcer were concentrated by experience. The second variable, also a Herndahl index, measures the degree of specialization since the rst promotion to the Centre. Somewhat surprisingly, early specialization and post-Centre specialization have a low correlation of .0214. Control variables: The control variables used for this analysis are the same used in the analysis of the rst promotion to the Centre. These include controls for age and tenure, human capital, language and basic demographic characteristics. Summary statistics for this analysis are presented in Table 4. [Table 4 about here.]

Results

5.1 Promotion to the Centre

For our rst analysis we use logistic regression to estimate discrete-time event-history models of the rst promotion to a posting in the Centre (Allison & Christakis 2006). In addition to our main variable of interest, career specialization, we include control variables that provide information about an ofcers education, experience and demographic characteristics and the xed effects of their entry cohort, cadre and year. We cluster standard errors in all regressions at the individual level because of the repeated individual obser-

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vations. Table 5 presents the estimated models. Column 1 shows that, as expected, both the number of postings and age have inverted-U shaped relationships to the log-odds of promotion. The relationship between promotion to the Centre and age indicates that the promotion probability peaks at age 46. Column 2 adds the basic ascriptive controls to the model. We nd that IAS ofcers from some of the major linguistic groups are more likely to be promoted to the Centre. The effect of gender is not signicant in this model, though its size increases in later models. Column 3 includes controls for human capital. We nd strong evidence of the effect of educational performance on promotion to New Delhi. In particular, ofcers who graduated in the rst division of their undergraduate class are are more likely to be promoted to the Centre. There is also evidence that ofcers with more degrees experience greater likelihood of promotion. IAS ofcers with medical or science backgrounds appear less likely to be promoted. [Table 5 about here.] Column 4 presents the model with our key independent variable, the Herndahl index measuring career specialization. The variables coefcient is positive and signicant, suggesting that more specialization during an IAS ofcers early career increases his or her chances of promotion to the Centre. A one-standard-deviation increase in specialization results in a 85.5-percent increase in an IAS ofcers probability of promotion to a Centre posting.4 By comparison, exponentiating the coefcient on the rst-division dummy variable shows that having graduated in the rst division increases the probability of a Centre posting by 32.8 percent. All else equal, the returns to specialization in this labor market outstrip the benets of high levels of academic achievement, even among a highly qualied pool of competitors.

5.2 Empanelment as Joint Secretary

The second analysis we conduct examines whether an ofcer who has been promoted to the Centre is eventually empaneled as a joint secretary. As in the rst stage we use logistic
4 Per

table 3, the standard deviation for the log of the Herndahl index is 0.474, and exp(1.304 .474) =

1.855.

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regression to estimate discrete-time event-history models of empanelment. We examine the effect of two key independent variables: early and post-Centre specialization. The estimated models, presented in Table 6, include the same controls as the models for rst promotion to the Centre. [Table 6 about here.] Column 1 presents the control variables. As expected, we nd inverted-U shaped relationships between number of postings and the probability of empanelment. A similar relationship is found to exist with age. The probability of empanelment peaks at age 49. This age prole corresponds to the tenure expectations for achieving the post of Joint Secretary in the Centre: the minimum tenure requirement is 20 years and the mean age at entry for regular recruits is 27.3 years. The the ascriptive variables have no signicant effect on the probability of empanelment. However, human capital, particularly the effect of graduating in the rst division, tends to increase the probability that an IAS ofcer is empaneled as a Joint Secretary. Having graduated in the rst division increases the probability of empanelment by approximately 75 percent. We also nd some effect of having a larger number of degrees, though these predictors are not as signicant as having graduated in the rst division. We should also note that we do not nd any relationship between degree majors and the probability of empanelment. Presumably by this stage in an ofcers career the human capital acquired within the service dominates the more general human capital from their school years, though the rst divisions proxy for ability still appears to shine through. Columns 2 and 3 add in two key independent variables separately into the model. Column 2 shows a positive and signicant relationship between career specialization after the ofcers posting to the Centre and their likelihood of empanelment. The relationship between specialization before such postings and empanelment, however, is not signicant in column 3. We think that this non-signicance is due to the aforementioned low correlation between ofcers pre- and post-Centre specialization. Once we stratify on their level of post-Center specialization, as in column 4, we nd that early specialization is also associated with a higher rate of empanelment. Using the estimates in column 4, results

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indicate that a one-standard-deviation increase in specialization after a posting to New Delhi increases the probability of empanelment by 40.4 percent. One reservation about these results is that, while we can observe multiple measures of human capital and work experience, we cannot observe more job- and organizationspecic measures of individual potential and t with the organization (Jovanovic 1979, Jovanovic 1984). People may be more likely to be promoted to Delhi because they are expected to do well in Delhi, and more importantly may not be promoted when their superiors think that their prospects for further career advancement are poor. If an individuals potential is correlated with the diversity of their experience, as would happen either if rising stars were rotated through jobs or if poor performers were shufed among positions, then our estimate of specializations effect would be biased. Ideally we would model such endogeneity between the two stages explicitly with something like a seemingly unrelated logit, where the residuals between the two stages were allowed to be correlated. However, models for correlated discrete-time event-history models have not yet been developed. In the interim, another option is to include for each individual who was promoted their predicted probability of promotion from the rst-stage model. The logic behind this is straightforward: someone who is posted to New Delhi because they have potential that our rst-stage model does not capture will have a large residual in that rst stage, and thus a low predicted probability of promotion. More typical candidates will have a higher predicted probability and a smaller residual, because they have less exceptional potential net of observables. Predicted probability of a Centre posting should thus be negatively correlated with empanelment. Our estimation in column 5 includes this predicted probability from the rst stage. The predicted probability is indeed negatively and signicantly correlated with empanelment. However, including it does not signicantly alter the size or signicance of the specialization parameters. This suggests that, while potential star ofcers may be fast-tracked to promotion, that fast-tracking does not involve exceptional mobility through different types of career experience. We again nd that specialization after posting to New Delhi increases the likelihood that an IAS ofcer will be empaneled. In this estimation we also see that individuals with high concentration early in their career, before their rst posting to the Centre, are 26.8 percent 19

more likely to be empaneled. The results in tables 5 and 6 both indicate that specialization increases the likelihood that IAS ofcers clear important and increasingly difcult career hurdles. Thus our results support the assertion that specialists experience greater career progression than generalists. Observing this relationship in a setting such as the Indian Administrative Service, an ostensibly generalist organization, is particularly striking. We have two motives in presenting the various analyses we describe below. First, we want to rule out alternative explanations for the effect of specialization on promotion and empanelment that we observe in the main models. Our chief worry in this regard is a spurious relationship between the diversication of an ofcers career experience and her chances of promotion, due to correlation with an unobserved third variable. We discuss these under the heading of robustness checks. Second, we want to understand better what mechanisms might be responsible for the observed effect. In this regard we are interested in nding theoretically relevant variables that mediate specializations effect on career outcomes. We discuss these under the heading of mechanisms.

5.3 Robustness Checks

5.3.1 Unobserved variation in talent

The fundamental empirical difculty with modeling the effects of specialization and diversication in labor markets is that individuals inherent ability is hard for an employer to observe before hire and that the degree of specialization in ones career is at best an ambiguous signal of ability. The IAS data is useful because the Services own selection procedures constrain recruits to be drawn from the tail end of an underlying ability distribution, and because the IAS records also contain detailed information on recruits schooling, giving us additional controls for ability. Furthermore, including a predicted probability of a Centre posting, as we do in column 5 of table 6, gives us one way to take into account the remaining variance in ability in the rst career hurdle when modeling the second. This empirical strategy does however rely on the assumption that the IASs recruit-

20

ment procedures actually do minimize variation in individual ability, which is virtually impossible to independently verify. We do have another way to approach the problem, though. We have multiple observations for each ofcer, and the Herndahl indices that we have constructed to measure specialization vary within ofcers over time, as the ofcers accrue new types of experience. We can exploit this variation to estimate models that include xed effects for each ofcer, and thus look at the within-person effect of relative specialization on the likelihood of a Centre posting. The ideal estimation procedure for this would be to t a conditional logit model, with groups corresponding to each individual. The conditional logit model has increasing trouble converging as the number of groups or the number of observations within each group grows large. Since we have several thousand groups with scores of observations in each, we face this problem. We can however approximate the results of a conditional logit by tting a model like the one estimated in column 4 of table 5 and including a xed effect for each individual. This procedure is biased but consistent, and the multitude of groups that makes convergence difcult in the conditional framework helps drive consistency in this approach. Accordingly, we estimated an individual xed-effect logit model for postings to New Delhi. This model is only identied for the individuals who eventually received such postings, and all time-invariant covariates are soaked up by the individual xed effects. We omit the full model here for brevitys sake but note that the within-person effect of specialization in these models is stronger ( = 2.908, p < 0.000) than that estimated in the main models. Controlling for individual heterogeneity with the individual xed effect, those who specialize faster are more likely to be posted to the Centre faster. The effects of specialization that we nd do not appear to be due to unobserved differences in ability between the IAS ofcers.

5.3.2

Self-selection

We discussed above that IAS ofcers, particularly early in their career, are shufed about based on the needs of the bureaucracy rather than on their individual preferences. The

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full picture is slightly more complicated. Ofcers have limited choice about when they move, because they are usually appointed for xed-term assignments in various state agencies. They have limited choice about where they move, because they can only bid for transfer to jobs that have vacancies when they in turn are coming up for transfer. Within those constraints, though, it is possible that savvy recruits could choose more or less similar jobs to their current one, depending on their inclination toward diversity. Thus some weak potential for self-selection still exists in these data. Controlling for this possibility would require data on all the vacancies that are available whenever each ofcer is eligible for transfer, as well as the jobs upon which each ofcer bid at each stagedata that simply is unavailable. We can get some suggestive evidence though by considering what ofcers career trajectories look like before and after they were posted to the Centre. If ofcers can self-select into more or less diverse trajectories earlier in their career, then presumably there will be signicant correlation between the diversity of their experiences before they are posted to New Delhi and the diversity of their experiences after they are posted, when they have some more control over the jobs they take. Conversely, if ofcers have little control over their early careers, then there should be less correlation between their pre- and post-Centre diversication. To test this, we focused on the 1,024 IAS ofcers in our population who were posted to New Delhi and who had accumulated at least ve years of work experience since their promotion. We calculated their specialization at the time of posting and their specialization ve years after that posting, in the latter case taking into account solely the positions they had held since. The correlation between these two measures is only 0.0131 and is not statistically signicant. Table 7 cross-tabulates the two variables. Here we have clustered the specialization measures into ve equally-spaced bins. Self-selection would imply greater frequencies in the cells along the principal diagonal of the table, yet there is no visible pattern in the frequencies. A 2 test of the independence of the matrixs rows and columns fails to reject the independence hypotheses (2 = 17.42, d f = 16, p = 0.36). The IAS is designed such that a particular ofcers interests should not determine their early career experiences; these data appear to reect that design.

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[Table 7 about here.]

5.3.3

Other robustness checks

Ofcers from different cadres or cohorts may follow different career sequences. Opportunities within state-level IAS cadres could constrain the postings to which ofcers have access; their career specialization would reect this, but by collapsing our analysis across states and cohorts we would mask this variation and incorrectly attribute the effect to specialization as such. In our models we include cadre and cohort xed effects. Both with and without these controls our variables of interest retain their directions, magnitudes and levels of signicance. We also estimated within-cohort models to address concerns about cohort-specic career patterns. Results for both career milestones are presented in Table 8. All estimations include the controls from the full models in table 5 and 6. Specialization remains positive and signicant in all models, indicating that the effects of specialization on career progression are robust even within cohorts. A related analysis (available on request) was conducted for male and female sub-samples, with results that also support our main hypothesis. [Table 8 about here.] We tried several different specications of the empanelment models. A common reservation about the use of Herndahl indices in dynamic models is that any such timevarying index can be correlated with time, which can bias estimates of time-varying effects (Allison & Christakis 2006). One way to break this correlation is to dispense with the event-history framework and instead use a simpler specication of time. Dispensing with the framework means being unable to estimate the effects of individual variables that vary in time, such as tenure and number of promotions, which is why we prefer to present the event-history models for our main results. It is however worth checking that doing so does not come at the cost of the above-mentioned bias. We therefore estimated simple logit models of whether an ofcer who was posted to New Delhi was ever empaneled in the ten-year period following their promotion. In these models we included a snapshot of their post-Centre specialization, operationalized as their specialization score ve 23

years after their posting. No ofcers were empaneled in fewer than ve years after their rst Centre posting, so this seemed a reasonable window to use. These models yielded substantively similar results to our main models, as do ones that use slightly different time windows for the snapshot of specialization and empanelment. Models that use a snapshot of early-career specialization after four years (when ofcers are rst eligible for posting to New Delhi) and that ask whether an ofcer was ever posted to New Delhi in their rst ten years in the service also yield results that are comparable to our rst-stage analysis. We are condent therefore that the event-history models are appropriate for analyzing these data.

5.4 Mechanisms
5.4.1 Homophily

One social mechanism that might explain why we nd these effects of specialization is homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook 2001). Specically, if a ministry in New Delhi already has a number of staffers from an IAS ofcers cadre or several of his fellow cohort-recruits, then that ofcer might be more likely to be promoted into that ministry. Such homophily need not affect how much an ofcer moves around early in his career and thus need not automatically be correlated with specialization as well. However, homophily often produces unofcial segmentation in career paths, and any social process that limits the variability of IAS ofcers potential moves and also raises their chances of promotion would overstate specializations purported effect. To test possibility, we calculated each cadres share of the positions in each ministry in each month (Barnett, Baron & Stuart 2000). Thus for example we calculated the share of Gujaratis working in forestry in New Delhi in January 1993, as well as the share of Keralites, Punjabis and so on. We then include those shares of ministry employment as independent variables in the main models. This approach has one distinct limitation: our data cover everyone who joined the IAS after 1976, but we do not observe everyone who was in the IAS after 1976. People who joined the IAS earlier than 1976 and retired before our data were collected do not appear. Thus as we go back in time our calculations of

24

these cadre shares become more prone to survivor bias. To minimize that effect here, we focus on those ofcers who joined the IAS after 1990. We calculate similar shares of ministry employment for each cohort. In the case of cohorts our data are not subject to survivor bias, so we can use the full sample, but we also estimated this variable on the post-1990 sub-sample to be able to compare cohort homophily to cadre homophily. Table 9 reports results from these models. Column 1 reproduces the full model from table 5. Contrary to what we would expect if regional homophily were strongly inuencing promotions, column 2 shows that the effect of ones cadres share of a ministrys posts in New Delhi is negatively correlated with a Centre posting. This at least suggests that the IASs ofcial goal of lling central government posts with a geographically balanced group of personnel is carried out in practice. Similarly, column 3 shows that ones cohorts share is also negatively correlated with promotion to New Delhi. Rather than homophily among fellow recruits, this negative relationship suggests that crowding-out is more likely. (Examining all years for cohort share yields a smaller but still signicant = .914, p = 0.001.) Column 4 includes both measures in the model; cadre share is marginally signicant once accounting for cohort share. Most importantly, in none of these models does the estimated effect of specialization change signicantly from that in the main model. Homophily or simple favoritism by geographic region or among fellow recruits does not appear to drive career specialization or its effect on promotion. [Table 9 about here.]

5.4.2

Status tracks

Our analysis presumes that the probability of moving between any two types of jobs within the IAS is constant. In practice, there could exist modal careers or tracks within the service (Abbott 1990), such for example that an ofcer who is working in Finance is more likely to move to External Affairs than to Youth Affairs and Sports. The existence of such mobility clusters (Doeringer & Piore 1971, Stewman 1985) could seriously bias the results that we have found. To understand why, imagine two hypothetical tracks, Economics and Human Development. Economics involves two types of experience:

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Finance and External Affairs. Human Development involves ve types: Rural Development, Social Justice and Empowerment, Women and Child Development, Agriculture and Cooperation, and Health and Family Welfare. Imagine furthermore that the Economics jobs are considered higher-status within the IAS than the Human Development jobs. Ofcers in the Economics track will have more specialized experience than ofcers in the Human Development track and will be promoted more often than ofcers in the Human Development track, but it will not be specialization as such that causes their promotion. Rather, their being on a higher-status track through the service inuences both their specialization and their promotion prospects. We conducted several investigations to understand what if any types of career tracks exist within the IAS. First, we checked whether the types of Centre positions into which ofcers were posted had changed over time. Figure 1 shows the breakdown of experiences for each group of IAS ofcers who were posted to New Delhi in a given year. Save for some shift from Defense to Personnel after the early years, gure 1 shows no statistically signicant growth or decline in any one experiences share of postings. This suggests that, to the extent any tracking exists, it has been stable over time in the IAS. [Figure 1 about here.] We next explored the sequences in which ofcers accumulated their experience (Abbott 1995). We focused on their rst four years, because this is the period during which most ofcers are ineligible for postings to New Delhi. Any sort of sequence matching that included later periods would select on the dependent variable. Figure 2 shows the 48-month career histories of 2,667 IAS ofcers (those who entered through regular recruitment and had amassed four years experience by 31 December 2008), coded by experience. This is a same-order sequence plot (Brzinsky-Fay, Kohler & Luniak 2006), which ignores the amount of time that individual ofcers spent in each position and only focuses on the order in which positions were held. That virtually every ofcer begins in Land Revenue Management & District Administration is obvious, as is that many ofcers spend their rst four years in the IAS accumulating only one or two types of experience. Furthermore, fteen of the forty possible types of experience account for more than 90 percent of 26

ofcers early postings. Finallythough this is admittedly harder to discern visually most of the ofcers who accumulated more than two types of experience moved from one of these fteen common experiences into another common one. [Figure 2 about here.] This evidence led us to suspect that these common experience types might constitute a mobility cluster. We therefore constructed a 40 40 matrix tallying the observed movements between each pair of experiences. Figure 3 show the graph of that matrix (We have excluded Land Revenue Management & District Administration, which is connected to every other experience type because virtually all IAS ofcers start out as district administrators). The edges of that graph that we have marked in bold represent ve or more moves between the connected nodes.5 Figure 3 shows a striking bifurcation: the most common types of experience form a connected component, while all the remaining types of experience are virtual isolates. This suggests that there is some tracking in the IAS: recruits either move into the mainstream cluster of experiences, between which there is considerable mobility, or they move into rarer specialties and stay there. [Figure 3 about here.] Because rare experiences involve little mobility, anyone working in them would appear specialized by our measure. This is cause for concern: because someone has to do such rarer work in New Delhi, serve as Joint Secretaries over those substantive areas and so on, ofcers in rarer lines of work appear more specialized and are more likely to be promoted. We wanted to make sure that our results were not being driven solely by this bifurcation of career tracks. We therefore re-estimated our main model with a dummy variable for whether an IAS ofcers second type of experience was one of the rare ones. Accumulating rare experience is positively correlated with likelihood of promotion to the center; indeed the effect size ( = 1.32, p 0.001) is comparable to what we have found for specialization.6 Yet the specialization effect persists even in this model. Similarly
that this is not ve transitions per person or per year, but ve transitions anywhere in the IAS by the 32 observed cohorts between 1976 and 2008. Thus as a threshold, ve is quite low. 6 A model that includes xed effects for ofcers second experiences, not reported here, gives substantively identical results.
5 Note

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specializations effect is still signicant when we estimate the full model only on those ofcers who moved into the main mobility cluster after their initial experience ( = 1.26, p 0.001). When these pieces are considered together, there seems little evidence that the sort of benets for specialization that we see here are being produced by differential career tracks within the IAS. One powerful source of promotion advantage comes from having rare types of experiences; it follows logically that administrators in New Delhi would have to choose from a smaller pool of candidates to work in such jobs in the Centre. Yet even among those IAS ofcers who accumulate common types of work experience, those who specialize within that main mobility cluster are more likely to be tapped for promotion than those who are more diversied.

5.4.3

Depth of experience

A third possible mechanism driving the effects we nd is that specialization may solely reect an actors accumulation of specic skills. In other words, once we control for the amount of each type of experience that each actor has, our index of specialization should no longer be signicant. That is to say, what previous research has treated as a liability of breadth may instead be interpreted as an asset of depth. Both depth and breadth of experience inhere in the construction of the Herndahl index. To control for the effect of an IAS ofcers depth of experience on his or her chances of a Centre posting and empanelment, we re-estimated the full models from tables 5 and 6 with controls for the number of months of each type of experience that an ofcer had accumulated prior to time t.7 Including these 39 additional covariates does not affect the direction or the signicance of our index, in either model. That the indices remain signicance even when we control for ofcers comparable skill proles suggests that our main result does not reect depth of experience alone. At least when it comes to being posted to the Centre or being empaneled, these models suggest that there are independent penalties for having a less coherent career history.
controls are mathematically identical to specifying ofcers grades of membership (Hannan, Polos & Carroll 2007) in each type of experience. We do not report these full results here because of length; they are available upon request.
7 These

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Yet the additional covariates for depth of experience are jointly signicant in both models (Centre posting: 2 = 154.43, p .001; Empanelment: 2 = 82.83, p .001). This suggests that specic types of accumulated experience do matter for career outcomes. There are two ways to interpret this effect. One is that it deep experience is interpreted by evaluators as a signal of quality, as most of the previous research on specialization in labor markets has argued. On the other hand, that deep experience could benet a candidate because the vacancy requires such experience.

5.4.4

Matching job-specic skills

The way to test between these two interpretations of why depth of experience matters is to examine whether there is any systematic relationship between the type of experience that ofcers specialized in and the type of experience required for the job in which they were empaneled. If there is a relationship between these two, then there is evidence that depth of experience matters not because it is a noisy signal of quality but rather because it is a cleaner signal of specic skills. To test this, we estimated multinomial logistic regression models examining how ofcers were sorted into positions upon empanelment. Since it would be difcult to estimate a model using all forty majors, we looked at whether individuals who specialized in one of the four most common types of experience among the Joint-Secretary positions into which these ofcers were empaneled. These four were nance, industries, home, and personnel; together these constitute 37 percent of all postings. The dependent variable in our model is the likelihood that an empaneled ofcer is posted in one of these majors, relative to all other majors. The key independent variables in this model are four indicator variables signifying that an ofcers greatest share of experience is in nance, industries, home, or personnel. If there is a strong tendency for managers to ll postings with specialists who have category-specic experience, then there should be a positive correlation between our indicator variables and the probability of being empaneled into a posting requiring the same experience. The model results are presented in table 10. Having experience in nance increases

29

the likelihood that an ofcer becomes a joint secretary dealing with nance. A similar relationship exists for those with experience in industries, home, and personnel. We also nd that having depth in one of these types of experience can make ofcers less likely to be empaneled with responsibilities for another type. For example, columns 1 and 4 of table 10 show that ofcers with home experience are less likely to be empaneled as joint secretaries dealing with nance or personnel. Similarly, those with industries experience are unlikely to become joint secretaries covering personnel. Finally, once we control for the type of experience that empaneled ofcer have and the experience required for the position into which they were empaneled, we nd that the effects of our indices of specialization, which have persisted in all previous specications, are no longer signicant. [Table 10 about here.] We also examined the match between experience before a Centre posting and the job to which an ofcer was posted in the Centre. We present these results in table 11. We do not nd any systematic evidence of matches driving the pattern of Centre postings at this earlier stage. While experience in some lines of work make postings in some other lines less likely (as for example commerce ruling out nance, home, or industries), focal experience does not seem to be associated with greater likelihood of a focal posting. [Table 11 about here.] These results suggest two things. First, the patterns of results for Centre postings and for empanelments differ. In posting to the Centre, we nd that the index of specialization is signicant but the specic experiences accumulated do not drive the pattern of postings. This does jibe with the idea that, at this stage, evaluators may take specialization as a general sign of ability. In empanelments, however, evaluators who ll postings prefer candidates who are not merely specialized but who have specialized experience in the type of work the manager is trying to ll. Second, developing specialist skill is not, in and of itself, necessarily a benet here; rather, accumulating skill in one domain can close off an ofcers opportunities for some types of jobs even as it makes others easier to get. There are vacancies within the IASs occupational structure that require specic

30

types of skill. Being a specialist in and of itself may confer some benet, but at this more ne-grained level of analysis it becomes apparent that, conditional on the vacancies that ofcers face, being specialized in the wrong type of skill is not necessarily any better than not being specialized at all.

Discussion

In this study, we have analyzed the effects of specialization and diversication in an unusually rich context. We have included more controls for sources of confounding variation than previous research has. Even when controlling for factors such as differences in individual ability, self-selection, survivor bias, homophily, and mobility patterns, our analysis of Indian Administrative Service ofcers suggests that specializing has profound effects on careers. Indias elite generalist bureaucrats advance faster in their careers if they get less general experience. Even in a context that has formal norms favoring diversication and good information about candidates performance, there are penalties to diversication. This nding is surprising, in light of previous theory. An internal labor market with managerial rotation like the IAS has been theorized to be a place where generalists would be treated better (Zuckerman 2005). Because these labor markets have less asymmetric information and because candidates and evaluators face lower risks for experimenting, the typecasting problem that governs external labor markets was theorized not to apply. Yet we nd penalties associated with diversication that look like those described in the typecasting literature (Zuckerman et al. 2003). Even more surprisingly, these penalties do not seem to go away for senior IAS ofcers, as they do for lm-industry veterans. The effects of specialization here call to mind a Russian doll: even where the absolute level of career diversication is higher than would be expected in a comparable external labor market, the relative level of diversication carries a penalty. We have theorized that the benets of specialization are driven by the differential accumulation of specic experiences, and the matching of ofcers accumulated experiences with vacancies experience requirements. We have shown in particular that matches be-

31

tween career histories and vacancies are signicant among those IAS ofcers who were empaneled as Joint Secretaries. This idea is not entirely new. Zuckerman et al. (2003) for example demonstrated that experience in a genre helped actors get future work in that genre. What we want to emphasize is that having experience, which has been treated as something that mitigates the negative effects of typecasting, can itself produce evaluator bias in favor of specialization, even in labor markets where typecasting is not a problem. Although we have conducted the most detailed analysis of categorization in labor markets thus far, there are some limitations, based on the availability of data, that we should note. These have to do with alternative mechanisms that could help to explain the effects of specialization that we observe, even within matches of the type that we have described. First and foremost, though we have multiple controls for confounding differences in ability, we do not have complete information on individuals performance in specic jobs. We would need this to evaluate the between-individual, within-job effects of specialization (Castilla 2008). For example, changing domains of substantive experience often involves changing supervisors and colleagues. It is possible that those individuals who move around more develop fewer ties to their evaluators, and thus net of ability have weaker performance evaluations than individuals who move around less. Without the performance evaluations of each ofcer in each job, we cannot rule out this mechanism. Having such data would likely not overturn our results but it could suggest a different explanation for why they exist. Similarly, we do not observe the bidding pool for each vacancy. We cannot rule out that more specialized ofcers put themselves up for posting to the Centre at different rates. We can say though that this is unlikely to apply at the empanelment stage, where all ofcers in a cohort are simultaneously evaluated; and we have no theoretical prior for expecting self-selection on this dimension into the bidding pool at the earlier stage. Nonetheless, the possibility of such bias in the rst stage means would affect the risk set in the second stage. Ideally future research into such effects of specialization on career paths will leverage empirical settings where data on supply-side sorting is available, as for example has been done in the work on networks and hiring (Fernandez & Mors 2008, Fernandez & Friedrich 2011). 32

Certainly generalists are more common in labor markets with managerial rotation than they are in, for example, external labor markets. But controlling for the setting, the more diversied do worse than the more specialized, even here. This raises the question of whether there exists a context where, controlling for the overall level of actor diversication and the prevailing theory of value, generalists are actually preferred to specialists. At the very least, this study suggests that it is not enough that the individual does not know what tasks she will have to perform from day to day, and thus has an incentive to maintain some slack (Hannan & Freeman 1977). The types of jobs that the organization expects the individual to perform, and the skills required to do those jobs, must perhaps also be in play.

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Hsu, Greta. 2006. Jacks of all trades and masters of none: Audiences reactions to spanning genres in feature lm production. Administrative Science Quarterly 51(3):420450. Hsu, Greta, Michael T. Hannan & Ozgecan Kocak. 2009. Multiple Category Memberships in Markets: An Integrative Theory and Two Empirical Tests. American Sociological Review 74:150169. Jovanovic, Boyan. 1979. Job matching and the theory of turnover. The Journal of Political Economy 87(5):972 990. Jovanovic, Boyan. 1984. Matching, turnover, and unemployment. The Journal of Political Economy 92(1):108 122. Krishna, Anirudh. 2010. Continuity and change: the Indian administrative service 30 years ago and today. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 48(4):433444. Leung, Ming D. 2010. Dilettante or renaissance man? How the sequence of category memberships affects credibility in an online market for services. Working paper - Stanford University. . Lincoln, James R. 1992. Culture, Control, and Commitment: A Study of Work Organization and Work Attitudes in the United States and Japan. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lounsbury, Michael & Hayagreeva Rao. 2004. Sources of Durability and Change in Market Classications: A Study of the Reconstitution of Product Categories in the American Mutual Fund Industry, 19441985. Social Forces 82(3):969999. McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin & James M. Cook. 2001. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology 27:415444. Mishra, Ram K. 2001. The National Civil Service System of India: A Critical View. In Civil Service Systems in Asia, ed. John P. Burns & Bidhya Bowornwathana. Edward Elgar Publishers pp. 117151. Negro, Giacomo, Ozgecan Kocak & Greta Hsu. 2010. Research on Categories in the Sociology of Organiza tions. Research in the Sociology of Organizations . Osterman, Paul. 1987. Choice among Alternative Internal Labor Markets. Industrial Relations 26:4667. Portes, Alejandro. 1998. Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 24(1):124. Potter, David C. 1986. Indias political administrators, 1919-1983. Clarendon Press. Quiones, Miguel A., J. Kevin Ford & Mark S. Teachout. 1995. The Relationship Between Work Experience and Job Performance: A Conceptual and Meta-analytic Review. Personnel Psychology 48(4):887910. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1995.tb01785.x Ridgeway, Cecilia L. & Shelley J. Correll. 2004. Unpacking the Gender System: A Theoretical Perspective on Gender Beliefs and Social Relations. Gender and Society 18(4):pp. 510531. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149448 Shurmer-Smith, Pamela. 1998. Becoming a Memsahib: Working with the Indian Administrative Service. Environment and Planning A 30:21632180. Spence, Michael. 1973. Job Market Signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 87(3):355374. Stewman, Shelby. 1985. Interdependent Managerial Decisions and the Opportunity Structures of WhiteCollar Internal Labor Markets. Carnegie Mellon University Working Paper. Stewman, Shelby. 1986. Demographic Models of Internal Labor Markets. Administrative Science Quarterly 31(2):212247. Thomas Jr., William C. 1961. Generalist versus Specialist: Careers in a Municipal Bureaucracy. Public Administration Review 21(1):815. Zuckerman, Ezra W. 1999. The categorical imperative: Securities analysts and the illegitimacy discount. American Journal of Sociology 104(5):13981438. Zuckerman, Ezra W. 2005. Typecasting and Generalism in Firm and Market: Genre-Based Concentration in the Feature Film Industry, 19331995. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 23:173216. Zuckerman, Ezra W., Tai-Young Kim, Kalinda Ukanwa & James von Rittman. 2003. Robust Identities or Non-Entities? Typecasting in the Feature-Film Labor Market. American Journal of Sociology 108(5):1018 1074.

34

Table 1: Comparison of IAS ofcers admitted (from Indian Personnel Ministry Annual Reports, 19952008) to IAS ofcers in data set Allotment Year Actual Admitted In data Difference 1995 80 79 1 1996 80 78 2 1997 76 76 0 1998 55 55 0 1999 55 51 4 2000 56 55 1 2001 59 58 1 2002 59 59 0 2003 70 71 -1 2004 89 88 1 (1 ) 2005 91 90 1 2006 87 86 1 2007 89 89 0 2008 111 109 2(2) Total 1057 1044 15
1. One person transferred to the Indian Foreign Service after entry. 2. The initial allocation of two candidates was provisional due to non-clearance.

35

Table 2: Distribution of monthly experience by type for IAS ofcers 1974-2008

Experience Land Revenue Mgmt and District Admn Personnel and General Admn Finance Not Applicable Industries Agriculture and Cooperation Urban Development Human Resource Dev Rural Dev Social Justice and Empowerment Home Health and Family Welfare Energy Consumer Affairs, Food and PD Commerce Transport Planning and Prog Implementation Textiles Water Resources Tourism Labour and Employment Local Self Govt Environment and Forests Law and Justice Women and Child Dev Information and Broadcasting Communications and Information Technology Mines and Minerals Defence Culture Science and Technology Youth Affairs and Sports Public Works Petroleum and Natural Gas Staff Ofcers Chemicals and Fertilizers Parliamentary Affairs External Affairs Corporate Management Development of NER Frequency 189452 46060 42840 40862 32878 27136 24282 18279 16623 15086 14294 12246 10915 10757 9941 9322 7365 6401 6005 5359 5095 5091 5074 4848 4446 3992 3459 3411 3404 3168 2892 2572 2388 1581 1150 569 467 241 193 35 Percent 31.57 7.67 7.14 6.81 5.48 4.52 4.05 3.05 2.77 2.51 2.38 2.04 1.82 1.79 1.66 1.55 1.23 1.07 1 0.89 0.85 0.85 0.85 0.81 0.74 0.67 0.58 0.57 0.57 0.53 0.48 0.43 0.4 0.26 0.19 0.09 0.08 0.04 0.03 0.01 Cumulative 31.57 39.24 46.38 53.19 58.66 63.19 67.23 70.28 73.05 75.56 77.94 79.98 81.8 83.59 85.25 86.8 88.03 89.1 90.1 90.99 91.84 92.69 93.53 94.34 95.08 95.75 96.32 96.89 97.46 97.99 98.47 98.9 99.29 99.56 99.75 99.84 99.92 99.96 99.99 100

36

Table 3: Summary Statistics: First promotion to central government analysis count mean sd Promotion to Centre 434438 0.003 0.056 Postings 434438 4.056 4.255 Age 434438 34.457 6.868 Female 434438 0.135 0.341 Hindi 428439 0.521 0.500 Bengali 428439 0.036 0.186 Telugu 428439 0.070 0.256 Marathi 428439 0.033 0.178 Tamil 428439 0.075 0.264 First Division 434438 0.664 0.472 Engineering 434438 0.232 0.422 Humanities 434438 0.315 0.465 Medicine 434438 0.046 0.209 Professional 434438 0.138 0.345 Science 434438 0.318 0.466 Business 434438 0.185 0.388 Law 434438 0.078 0.268 No. of Subjects 434438 1.705 0.833 Two degrees 434438 0.433 0.496 Three degrees 434438 0.191 0.393 Four degrees 434438 0.092 0.289 Specialization 434438 -1.693 0.537 Observations 434438

37

Table 4: Summary statistics: Empanelment to Joint Secretary analysis count mean sd Empanelment as Joint Secretary 164874 0.002 0.050 Postings 164874 8.571 4.085 Age 164874 41.950 5.871 Female 164874 0.148 0.355 Hindi 164434 0.485 0.500 Bengali 164434 0.070 0.256 Telugu 164434 0.055 0.229 Marathi 164434 0.025 0.156 Tamil 164434 0.089 0.285 First Division 164874 0.627 0.484 Engineering 164874 0.149 0.356 Humanities 164874 0.401 0.490 Medicine 164874 0.016 0.126 Professional 164874 0.216 0.411 Science 164874 0.365 0.482 Business 164874 0.226 0.418 Law 164874 0.082 0.274 No. of Subjects 164874 1.921 0.865 Two degrees 164874 0.423 0.494 Three degrees 164874 0.274 0.446 Four degrees 164874 0.160 0.367 Specialization (Pre) 164874 -1.522 0.362 Specialization (Post) 164874 -1.748 0.490 Observations 164874

38

Table 5: Logistic Regression Predicting First Promotion to Central Government Post in New Delhi (1) Promotion to Centre Postings (Postings)2 Age (Age)2 IAS Tenure Female Hindi Bengali Telugu Marathi Tamil First Division Engineering Humanities Medicine Professional Science Business Law No. of Subjects Two degrees 0.470 (0.0381) -0.0161 (0.00224) 1.027 (0.0868) -0.0115 (0.00113) -0.0128 (0.00209) (2) 0.472 (0.0384) -0.0163 (0.00224) 1.033 (0.0867) -0.0114 (0.00112) -0.0127 (0.00212) 0.198 (0.101) 0.542 (0.0910) 0.510 (0.168) 0.199 (0.146) 0.0135 (0.244) 0.393 (0.143) (3) 0.458 (0.0391) -0.0158 (0.00226) 1.067 (0.0881) -0.0115 (0.00114) -0.0139 (0.00216) 0.235 (0.107) 0.506 (0.0919) 0.485 (0.168) 0.142 (0.147) 0.0486 (0.247) 0.363 (0.148) 0.321 (0.0762) 0.00512 (0.110) -0.215 (0.117) -0.589 (0.193) 0.184 (0.119) -0.275 (0.0940) 0.0459 (0.104) -0.265 (0.135) 0.106 (0.0812) 0.120 (0.102) (4) 0.573 (0.0377) -0.0171 (0.00215) 0.819 (0.0868) -0.00820 (0.00112) -0.0185 (0.00221) 0.435 (0.106) 0.550 (0.0936) 0.560 (0.170) 0.160 (0.151) 0.0691 (0.244) 0.482 (0.146) 0.284 (0.0766) -0.0197 (0.111) -0.226 (0.119) -0.660 (0.209) 0.168 (0.120) -0.278 (0.0962) 0.0811 (0.105) -0.315 (0.140) 0.121 (0.0820) 0.164 (0.106)

39

Three degrees Four degrees Specialization Observations ll 423672 -8275.7 420676 -8189.0

0.232 (0.130) 0.352 (0.164)

420676 -8134.9

0.269 (0.133) 0.334 (0.171) 1.304 (0.111) 420676 -8045.5

Standard errors in parentheses All models include xed effects for cadre, cohort and year

p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001

40

Table 6: Logistic Regression Predicting Empanelment as Joint Secretary (1) Empanelment as Joint Secretary Postings (Postings)2 Age (Age)2 Female Hindi Bengali Telugu Marathi Tamil First Division Engineering Humanities Medicine Professional Science Business Law No. of Subjects Two degrees Three degrees 0.207 (0.0890) -0.00615 (0.00349) 4.998 (0.416) -0.0501 (0.00445) -0.00124 (0.203) 0.350 (0.154) 0.411 (0.263) -0.564 (0.341) 0.614 (0.531) -0.213 (0.254) 0.714 (0.140) 0.144 (0.234) -0.0629 (0.217) -0.238 (0.495) 0.0473 (0.199) -0.0815 (0.172) -0.238 (0.188) 0.221 (0.247) 0.00302 (0.146) 0.393 (0.250) 0.661 (0.273) (2) 0.250 (0.0913) -0.00665 (0.00356) 4.889 (0.415) -0.0489 (0.00444) 0.0118 (0.201) 0.323 (0.154) 0.374 (0.267) -0.551 (0.348) 0.565 (0.526) -0.262 (0.260) 0.689 (0.140) 0.0942 (0.235) -0.0835 (0.221) -0.209 (0.498) 0.0253 (0.201) -0.101 (0.172) -0.246 (0.192) 0.268 (0.248) 0.0325 (0.148) 0.385 (0.254) 0.642 (0.276) (3) 0.237 (0.0914) -0.00671 (0.00355) 4.974 (0.416) -0.0499 (0.00444) 0.0571 (0.204) 0.360 (0.155) 0.444 (0.263) -0.566 (0.345) 0.563 (0.545) -0.202 (0.253) 0.710 (0.140) 0.117 (0.235) -0.0662 (0.217) -0.216 (0.509) 0.0317 (0.199) -0.103 (0.173) -0.242 (0.188) 0.201 (0.249) 0.00177 (0.145) 0.399 (0.249) 0.672 (0.272) (4) 0.294 (0.0941) -0.00746 (0.00363) 4.851 (0.414) -0.0485 (0.00442) 0.0896 (0.202) 0.336 (0.156) 0.417 (0.265) -0.553 (0.354) 0.496 (0.542) -0.252 (0.259) 0.676 (0.139) 0.0571 (0.238) -0.0878 (0.221) -0.182 (0.516) -0.0000219 (0.202) -0.128 (0.173) -0.248 (0.191) 0.246 (0.251) 0.0318 (0.147) 0.389 (0.252) 0.653 (0.274) (5) 0.360 (0.0947) -0.00841 (0.00362) 4.902 (0.414) -0.0487 (0.00442) 0.201 (0.202) 0.511 (0.163) 0.540 (0.275) -0.443 (0.362) 0.454 (0.560) 0.0246 (0.266) 0.774 (0.140) 0.0618 (0.247) -0.164 (0.223) -0.231 (0.508) 0.0258 (0.205) -0.192 (0.175) -0.271 (0.193) 0.128 (0.250) 0.106 (0.148) 0.441 (0.262) 0.739 (0.284)

41

Four degrees Tenure since promotion Specialization (Post) Specialization (Pre) P(Promotion to Centre) Observations ll
Standard errors in parentheses

0.746 (0.322) -0.00903 (0.00362)

0.692 (0.327) -0.0105 (0.00369) 0.634 (0.154)

0.746 (0.322) -0.00961 (0.00362)

0.354 (0.207)

0.691 (0.326) -0.0114 (0.00370) 0.693 (0.158) 0.467 (0.210)

139075 -2433.5

139075 -2424.4

139075 -2431.6

139075 -2421.2

0.798 (0.333) -0.0117 (0.00367) 0.910 (0.173) 0.655 (0.215) -26.53 (6.929) 139075 -2407.0

All models include xed effects for cadre, cohort and year

p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001

42

Table 7: Cross-tabulation of pre- and post-Centre specialization Quintiles Quintiles of postherf of rstherf 1 2 3 4 5 No. % No. % No. % No. % No. % 1 46 4.5 47 4.6 44 4.3 28 2.7 40 3.9 3.8 32 3.1 36 3.5 56 5.5 42 4.1 2 39 3 37 3.6 43 4.2 41 4.0 45 4.4 39 3.8 4 44 4.3 40 3.9 37 3.6 40 3.9 44 4.3 5 39 3.8 43 4.2 47 4.6 38 3.7 37 3.6 Total 205 20.0 205 20.0 205 20.0 207 20.2 202 19.7 Pearson 2 (16) = 17.4208, Pr = 0.359

Total No. % 205 20.0 205 20.0 205 20.0 205 20.0 204 19.9 1024 100.0

43

Table 8: Logistic regressions predicting rst promotion to central government and empanelment as joint secretary, by 5-year cohorts Empanelment Promotion N N s.e. ll Cohort s.e. ll 19751979 2.201 76074 0.861 59173 (0.245) -1922.4 (0.377) -889.5 19801984 1.003 102635 1.456 43458 (0.198) -2129.8 (0.400) -700.6 19851989 1.411 96881 1.545 27607 (0.242) -1883.2 (0.466) -322.5 19901994 1.425 58157 (0.401) -890.5
Standard errors in parentheses

p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001

44

Table 9: Logistic Regressions of First Promotion to Central Government, Controlling for Region and Cohort Homophily (1) Promotion to Centre Postings (Postings)2 Age (Age)2 Female Hindi Bengali Telugu Marathi Tamil First Division Engineering Humanities Medicine Professional Science Business Law No. of Subjects Two degrees Three degrees 0.498 (0.0418) -0.0142 (0.00226) 0.771 (0.0898) -0.00767 (0.00114) 0.395 (0.125) 0.646 (0.110) 0.398 (0.224) 0.235 (0.163) 0.0660 (0.286) 0.640 (0.182) 0.358 (0.0880) 0.0109 (0.124) -0.272 (0.142) -0.657 (0.212) 0.0707 (0.137) -0.290 (0.112) 0.0482 (0.118) -0.384 (0.167) 0.208 (0.0950) 0.103 (0.113) 0.191 (2) 0.470 (0.0415) -0.0123 (0.00221) 0.673 (0.0904) -0.00656 (0.00114) 0.332 (0.125) 0.639 (0.109) 0.377 (0.230) 0.190 (0.160) 0.0240 (0.292) 0.603 (0.183) 0.336 (0.0876) -0.0237 (0.124) -0.287 (0.141) -0.678 (0.210) 0.0750 (0.138) -0.285 (0.110) 0.0250 (0.118) -0.400 (0.166) 0.218 (0.0953) 0.111 (0.113) 0.175 (3) 0.472 (0.0415) -0.0124 (0.00221) 0.673 (0.0906) -0.00657 (0.00114) 0.341 (0.125) 0.636 (0.109) 0.363 (0.231) 0.194 (0.160) 0.0196 (0.294) 0.608 (0.182) 0.334 (0.0875) -0.0199 (0.124) -0.286 (0.141) -0.690 (0.211) 0.0814 (0.138) -0.286 (0.110) 0.0263 (0.118) -0.400 (0.166) 0.214 (0.0954) 0.104 (0.114) 0.168 (4) 0.470 (0.0416) -0.0123 (0.00221) 0.675 (0.0906) -0.00660 (0.00114) 0.335 (0.126) 0.635 (0.109) 0.365 (0.231) 0.195 (0.160) 0.0191 (0.293) 0.601 (0.183) 0.334 (0.0875) -0.0221 (0.124) -0.285 (0.141) -0.683 (0.211) 0.0835 (0.138) -0.286 (0.110) 0.0280 (0.118) -0.400 (0.166) 0.213 (0.0954) 0.106 (0.114) 0.169

45

Four degrees Specialization IAS Tenure Cadre share in Centre Cohort share in Centre Observations ll
Standard errors in parentheses

(0.148) 0.210 (0.195) 1.153 (0.130) -0.0157 (0.00246)

(0.148) 0.211 (0.192) 1.332 (0.130) -0.0173 (0.00246) -0.929 (0.452)

(0.148) 0.207 (0.192) 1.348 (0.130) -0.0172 (0.00246) -2.393 (0.618) 250295 -5911.4

320186 -6110.6

246454 -5917.6

(0.148) 0.206 (0.192) 1.348 (0.130) -0.0172 (0.00246) -0.827 (0.469) -2.359 (0.624) 246454 -5909.4

All models include xed effects for cadre, cohort and year

p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001

46

Table 10: Multinomial Logistic Regression Predicting Major Position Upon Promotion to Joint Secretary (1) Finance -0.0165 (0.0401) -0.0560 (0.0472) -0.396 (0.460) 0.127 (0.283) 0.333 (0.234) -0.388 (0.448) 3.205 (0.457) 0.681 (0.682) -22.34 (0.484) 1.187 (0.481) -53.24 (28.29) -0.901 (1.646) 486 -449.2

Age Postings Female First Division ln Specialization (Post) ln Specialization (Pre) Finance Industries Home Personnel P(Empanelment) Constant Observations ll

Industries -0.0653 (0.0647) -0.0345 (0.0618) -0.358 (0.528) -0.110 (0.363) -0.0750 (0.227) 0.277 (0.549) 0.809 (0.550) 2.523 (0.401) 0.521 (1.065) 0.906 (0.451) -33.02 (25.57) 1.478 (3.300)

Home 0.0961 (0.0577) -0.0964 (0.0482) 0.148 (0.719) 0.245 (0.414) -0.0394 (0.164) 0.133 (0.384) 0.445 (0.789) 0.413 (0.814) 3.533 (0.597) 0.833 (0.372) 16.88 (13.21) -6.494 (3.096)

Personnel -0.0770 (0.0647) -0.0163 (0.0762) -0.735 (0.689) 0.335 (0.387) -0.362 (0.260) -0.413 (0.471) 0.863 (0.617) -12.80 (0.402) -22.89 (0.526) 2.044 (0.632) 6.035 (40.33) -0.621 (3.196)

Standard errors for all models are clustered at the cadre level. p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001

47

Table 11: Multinomial Logistic Regression Predicting Major Position at Posting to Centre (1) Personnel -0.0302 (0.0206) -0.0134 (0.0156) -0.617 (0.202) 0.248 (0.116) 0.213 (0.185) -0.127 (0.521) 1.137 (0.200) 0.179 (0.262) -0.00599 (0.229) -14.63 (0.716) -8.528 (7.150) 0.764 (1.071) 1350 -1924.7

Age Postings Female First Division ln Specialization Personnel Commerce Finance Industries Home P(Promotion to Centre) Constant Observations ll
Standard errors in parentheses

Commerce 0.0313 (0.0178) -0.0410 (0.0370) -0.490 (0.463) 0.126 (0.233) 0.0679 (0.331) 1.111 (0.503) -13.68 (1.113) 0.610 (0.350) 0.270 (0.596) -14.45 (0.652) 7.068 (4.855) -2.708 (0.845)

Finance 0.0507 (0.0343) -0.0963 (0.0573) -0.261 (0.237) 0.659 (0.256) -0.583 (0.228) -0.569 (1.056) -13.74 (1.149) 1.011 (0.357) 0.869 (0.314) 0.361 (1.372) -10.62 (4.559) -4.447 (1.132)

Industries 0.0159 (0.0401) -0.0429 (0.0798) -0.227 (0.544) 0.284 (0.0976) 0.0659 (0.372) -13.99 (0.544) -13.89 (1.170) 0.0322 (0.919) 0.406 (0.403) -14.62 (0.758) -17.67 (4.911) -2.152 (1.571)

Home -0.0162 (0.0401) 0.0335 (0.0634) -0.626 (0.262) -0.384 (0.198) 0.312 (0.380) 1.290 (0.522) -14.05 (1.062) -0.836 (0.744) -0.150 (0.843) 0.748 (0.579) 4.690 (2.951) -0.905 (1.579)

Standard errors for all models are clustered at the cadre level.

p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001

48

1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1

Personnel Commerce Industries Transport HR Dev Cons Affairs Health & Family Rural Dev

Finance Home Defense Textiles Agriculture Energy Social Justice

Figure 1: Shares of top 15 types of postings to New Delhi, by year

49

4 Months

6 Rural Dev Personnel Agriculture Social Justice Cons. Affairs HR Dev Health & Family

LRM&DA Finance Industries Urban Dev Home Planning Local Self Govt

Figure 2: Same-order career sequences for 2,667 IAS Ofcers.

50

Chemicals

Communications ParliamentaryAffairs WomenChild

LabourEmployment

Tourism

Defence

ExternalAf

Home Planning SocialJ ustice Water HealthFamily Textiles HumanResources

ConsumerAf

UrbanDev Environment Agriculture LocalSelfGov StaffOfficers Transport

RuralDev

Personnel

MinesMinerals Finance

I ndustries Energy Commerce

YouthAff Petroleum

PublicWorks Culture

ScienceTech

CorporateM I nformation Development LawJ ustice

Figure 3: Mobility between IAS experiences. One or more moves are shown as dotted edges; ve or more moves are shown as bold edges.

51