This paper shows the effect of school staff autonomy on educational performance. The distinctive feature with existing literature is that we employ variation in autonomy within the same country and within the same school type to reduce the omitted variables problems. To fully capture the...

This paper shows the value of school autonomy for educational performance. To fully capture the informational advantage of local actors, we define school autonomy as the operational empowerment of the principals and teachers. The Flemish secondary school system in Belgium is analyzed as it is...

Educational tracking is a very controversial issue in education. The tracking debate is about the virtues of uniformity and vertical differentiation in the curriculum and teaching. The pro-tracking group claims that curriculum and teaching better aimed at children's varied interest and skills...

In this paper we study the role of private debt financing in disciplining a state owned firm operating for a government that incurs a cost of public financing. We show that debt contracts allow the government to avoid socially costly subsidies by letting unprofitable state- owned firms default....

The focus of this paper is on the trade-off between cost efficiency and access in the choice of the optimal mix of public and private provision in universal health systems. We model a simple health care market in which the regulator acts as a third payer. Patients need one unit of medical...

In this paper, we discuss the choice for build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) concessions when governments and firm managers do not share the same information regarding the operation characteristics of a facility. We show that larger shadow costs of public funds and larger information asymmetries...

We consider a market in which a public firm completes against private ones, and ask what happens when the public firms is privatized. In the short run, privatization is harmful because prices rise: the disciplinary role of the public firm is lost. In the long run, privatization, leads to further...

This paper studies the effect of soft-budget constraints in a pure adverse selection model of monopoly regulation. We consider a government maximizing total surplus but incurring some cost of public funds A la Laffont Tirole (1993). We propose a regulatory set-up in which firms are free to enter...

We consider a market in which a public firm competes against private ones, and ask what happens when the public firm is privatized. In the short run, privatization is harmful because prices rise: the disciplinary role of the public firm is lost. In the long run, privatization leads to further...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of privatization in a mixed duopoly, where a private firm competes in quantities with a welfare-maximizing public firm. We consider two inefficiencies of the public sector: a possible cost inefficiency, and an allocative inefficiency due to...