Public Leaders

Have you ever wondered who chooses to become a university dean or to run for public office?  Once these folks are in office, how do we set up a set of rules to incentivize these guys to do their job rather than to pursue their own narrow goals?  Tim Besley's book Principled Agents? is a great place to start for thinking about the broad topic of selecting and motivating leaders.    I'm thinking about these issues because of my ongoing research interests in China's Mayor's environmental policy agenda but also because I read this article about the next mayor of NYC.    In the case of publicly traded corporations, the stock market provides a real time "report card" for how the CEO is doing.  Yes, there is a signal extraction problem of disentangling macro luck from performance but millions of traders are voting with their dollars.  In the case of non-traded assets such as Universities and cities, how do we know what the leaders are achieving?  What past experiences predict future success?  Below, I reproduce a photo of "Dr. De Blasio" from his NYU school days. I doubt he was  a Tom Sargent student.   Take a look at those eyes.  I think that Snoop Dogg would want to party with him.