States increasingly are raising financing indirectly through special-purpose entities (SPEs), variously referred to as authorities, special authorities, or public authorities. Notwithstanding their long history and increasingly widespread use, relatively little is known or has been written about...

This paper evaluates the performance of Italian local public enterprises (LPEs) with respect to their private sector counterparts. We address the following questions: i) do LPEs perform worse than (comparable) private firms?; ii) does the performance gap depend on the ownership structure (the...

This paper incorporates the vertical structure of governments into a mixed oligopoly model by considering the public firms owned by different government levels, namely, a state‐owned public firm and a local public firm. As in the existing literature, a state‐owned public firm is assumed to...

Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such government rent-seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership serves as a second-best commitment mechanism, through which the government agency...

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this quot;make-or-buyquot; choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a...