Recent empirical evidence, from countries in the European Union in particular, are much more ambiguous on the costs savings from private production of local public services than previous literature used to be. In this paper, an explanatory model of factors driving costs in solid waste collection...

This note examines the Integrity Pact (IP) methodology proposed by Transparency International to confront the problem of corruption in public procurement. The examination draws from a decision model for participants developed elsewhere, in which the critical elements are shown to be the...

The prisoner’s dilemma is sometimes invoked to describe the situation facing participants in tenders. Reasoning on the basis of the dilemma metaphor, it is contended that agreeing not to bribe public officials in order to win contracts (collaboration) leads to better outcomes than bribing...

In environments where regulations are lax and controls function badly, cleanly participating in tenders is irrational. An increase in one single firm’s propensity to bribe induces the same behaviour upon the others (“bad apple effect”), and the likelihood of firms to bribe tends to...

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social services). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the...

A number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller’s valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively. This widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature. Recent...

This paper employs ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation to examine the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the effect of FDI on per capita GDP growth in Bolivia over the period 1990:1-1998:4. The regression results find that the real effective multilateral exchange rate, the...

Elbert Dijkgraaf defended his PhD-thesis 'Regulating the Dutch Waste Market' at 5 november 2004. This thesis analyses whether the risen costs of waste collection and treatment can be diminished by changing policy instruments. The thesis shows that user fees are very effective in reducing the...