This is a note on corruption and underground economy in a Kaldor-type model of the business cycle. It appears that when the economy is booming and underground activities seek to enter the official economy, bureaucrats have the upper hand but until underground businesses cannot tolerate...

In this chapter we explain how the Belgian administration is confronted with a double challenge for building a representative bureaucracy. Representative bureaucracy is concerned with making bureaucracies more responsive to the public they serve (Krislov, 1974; Sowa & Selden, 2003). On the one hand,...

In order to advance the economic theory on bureaucrats and bureaucracies, this study models the behavior of a bureaucrat who has imperfect information regarding his financier. This model reveals that if a bureaucrat is forced to cut spending, he will trim nonproductive “discretionary profit”...

I provide a description of what I call the "bureaucratic reputation game", by defining the incentives of the relevant actors, their likely preferences, their available strategies, and how the playing out of such strategies produces organizational outputs. The main conclusions are twofold. First,...

This paper examines knowledge sharing processes in digital government projects (DGPs). Although knowledge sharing processes are a central feature of the functioning of government, they have received little attention in the literature. The importance of knowledge sharing has become even more...

The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public...

This is an empirical case study of "street-level" officials in a classic "regulatory" public agency: the Environmental Health Department in Kumasi and Accra, Ghana, where privatization and contracting-out of sanitary services have imposed new ways of working on Environmental Health Officers....