In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic...

Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

We develop a model where people differ in their altruistic preferences and can serve the public interest in two ways: by making donations to charity and by taking a public service job and exerting effort on the job. Our theory predicts that people who are more altruistic are more likely to take...

We develop a model where people differ in their altruistic preferences and can serve the public interest in two ways: by making donations to charity and by taking a public service job and exerting effort on the job. Our theory predicts that people who are more altruistic are more likely to take...

We study the relationship between workers' opportunities to help others on-the-job and volunteering behavior outside the workplace. We predict that there is substitutability between workers' contribution to other peoples' well-being by exerting effort on-the-job and outside the workplace. We...

Most countries pay substantial intergovernmental transfers to poor regions. Since these transfers are often paid with the aim of achieving regional convergence, they should have a positive effect on economic growth. However, it is equally possible that transfers perpetuate under-development by...

We assume like Bergstrom (1989) and Dijkstra (2007) that each child's utility is treated as a normal good in the altruistic head's utility function, and show that if utility functions lead to Almost Transferable Utility children can manipulate the tradeoff between their own utility and the...

Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public's perceptions of government's performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different types of...

In this paper we investigate the interplay between national rainy-day funds and supra-national transfers in a fiscal union. Given that the EU has established rules limiting deficits, national rainy-day funds could in theory provide a way for countries to obey the rules and use fiscal policy, yet...