We analyse whether, when and how local office-holders respond to the personal, economic incentives embedded in exogenously imposed population thresholds leading to an increased number and/or remuneration of local office-holders. Using data from all 589 Belgian municipalities over the period...

Previous work on the relation between school inputs and students' educational attainment typically fails to account for the fact that schools can adjust their grading structure, even though such actions are likely to affect students' incentives. Our theoretical model shows that, depending on...

In both public administration and economics, efficiency is brought forward as an important criterion for evaluating administrative actions. Clearly, its value as an assessment principle depends on our ability to adequately measure efficiency. This article argues that citizen's coproduction in...

Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, libraries, education, police, fire protection, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage production process. In the first stage, basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) are used to generate service potential (e.g., opening hours,...

Firms' political donations can induce distortions in the allocation of public procurement contracts. In this article, we employ an advanced non-parametric efficiency model to study the public sector (cost) efficiency implications of such distortions. Using a unique dataset covering the Czech...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...