Institutional reform is typically taken for granted in order to aid comparisons across and within countries. How reforms actually change institutions at a micro-level is often overlooked in historical research. I collected and digitised individual-level data on thousands of entrants to the British Civil Service from 1864-1875. I study an 1870 reform that forced exam-based hiring on a large part of, but not all, the public sector. Patronage use declined among treated organisations but remained an important hiring procedure. I find that civil service departments with more routine labour functions adopted examinations, while those with more varied tasks did not. Where potential skill was thought to be better measured by exams, departments complied as it was in their interest. I show that the degree of non-compliance was also explained by bargaining power between departments.

Soldiers in conscripted armies have low incentives to exert effort. We examine how shared regional identity between soldiers and officers affects this using data on all French fatalities during WW1. Following the death of a co-regional officer, soldiers from the same cultural region exhibit lower daily mortality relative to soldiers from different cultural regions within the same regiment. The effect is concentrated among low-ranking officers that possess clear cultural markers, when the cultural region is not diverse and when mission preferences are limited. This indicates clear social preferences for identity-aligned principals among soldiers.

How do pandemics affect medical demand? To study this, I combine district-level vaccination and mortality data from British India before, during, and after the 1918 influenza pandemic to study how pandemics affect medical demand in a developing nation. Districts worse affected by the pandemic report lower vaccinations, but only among young children. These differences disappear after three years. This demand shift is unrelated to either demographic or state capacity changes brought by the pandemic. I provide additional evidence suggesting that households reallocated resources in response to a short-term income shock, rather than changing their underlying attitudes to vaccination.