Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization in recent decades. How do different types of owners target and manage these assets? And does the contract form--control rights (concession) vs. outright ownership (sale)--matter? We explore these questions in the context of global...

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...

Infrastructure costs in the United States are high and rising. The procurement process is one potential cost driver. In this paper we conduct a survey of procurement practices across the 50 states. We survey both employees at each state department of transportation (DOT) and the road builders...

Despite the incentives of incumbent domestic listed corporations (DLCs) in the electricity generation industry, private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have played an outsized role in financing the energy transition. These new entrants are twice as likely to create...

We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers governing large territories, where administrative power needs to be delegated to local elites. We describe how economic change can motivate rulers to empower different elites and emphasize the interaction...

The US spends more than 4 trillion dollars per year on health care, largely conducted by private providers and reimbursed by insurers. A major concern in this system is overbilling, waste and fraud by providers, who face incentives to misreport on their claims in order to receive higher...

There is limited causal evidence on the effects of different public procurement regulations on project quality and value-for-money for projects funded by national governments and foreign aid donors. This paper uses policy and experimental variation to study how two key contracting...

Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government's ability to observe it and...

The assignment of workers to tasks and teams is a key margin of firm productivity and a potential source of state effectiveness. This paper investigates whether a low-capacity state can increase its tax revenue by optimally assigning its tax collectors. We study the two-stage random assignment...

We study how individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes. Using new micro-data on the political affiliation of business owners and private-sector workers in Brazil over the 2002-2019 period, we first document the presence of political assortative matching: business...