This paper outlines a number of practical initiatives to strengthen the role of development communication in infrastructure projects. The authors aim to facilitate better quality projects and to build consensus on the type of governance reforms needed to fight corruption, drawing on the...

This book argues for the urgent need for countries to move forward aggressively on adopting and upgrading quality and standards. The focus is on developing countries, many of which are lagging in the race for standards adoption, and within that category, on middle-income countries. The book...

This paper derives conditions under which reputation enables certifiers to resist capture. These conditions alone have strong implications for the industrial organization of certification markets: 1) Honest certification requires high prices that may even exceed the static monopoly price. 2)...

We investigate the introduction of a minimum quality standard (MQS) in a vertically differentiated duopoly with an environmental externality. We establish that the MQS bites only if the hedonic component of consumer preferences is sufficiently strong. Then, we illustrate an underlying tradeoff...

We investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting: We examine how certain professional and political characteristics of FASB members and SEC commissioners predict the accounting “reliability” and “relevance” of proposed standards. Notably, we find FASB members with...

Halal certification of financials product may reduce transaction costs for its buyers when it provides a trusted standard for investors that seek to comply with Islamic law. However, we show that in practice it takes considerable amounts of time (20 days) and money (USD 122,000) to obtain a...

This paper develops a model of evolving standards for academic publishing. It is motivated by the increasing tendency of academic journals to require multiple revisions of articles and by changes in the content of articles. Papers are modeled as varying along two quality dimensions: q and r. The...

The Supreme Court's Mayo decision and the D.C. Circuit's Cohen decision have made clear that principles of administrative law generally, and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in particular, apply to tax law and the IRS just as they do to all other federal agencies. The APA's arbitrary and...

Specifying the content of a requirement or a prohibition up front — e.g. replacing a “reasonable speed” requirement with a fifty-five miles per hour speed limit — can make life easier for enforcers and citizens alike. Recent efforts to substitute international tax rules for decades-old...