We analyze the extent of the integrated control of the state over privatized firms during the post-privatization decade (1995-2005) in the Czech Republic. During this period the integrated control potential of the state resembled a corporate pyramid. While pyramidal control was not fully...

We propose a modified theoretical framework based on John Dunning's classical OLI paradigm in the international business literature to analyze Chinese firms' fast-growing and aggressive outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). In particular, from an institutional perspective, we suggest a...

Formal and informal institutions are often viewed as complements or substitutes in empirical and theoretical works. However, no evidence of complementarities or substitutes is found in our empirical analysis of the interrelation between formal and informal decentralization across 64 provinces of...

Numerous countries are introducing citizen feedback schemes to tame corruption. We study how best to incorporate feedback in public officials' incentives. The main novelty of our proposal is to allow citizens to directly influence officials' pay. We consider a situation in which entrepreneurs...

Centralization of public procurement can lower prices for the government's direct purchase of goods and services. This paper focuses on indirect savings. Public administrations that do not procure directly through a central procurement agency might benefit from the availability of...

While effective bureaucracy is crucial for state capacity, its decision-making remains a black box. We elicit preferences of 900+ real-world public procurement officials in Finland and Germany. This is an important pursuit as they report having sizeable discretion and minimal extrinsic...

We consider an economy where most of the health care is publicly provided,and where there is waiting time for several types of treatments. Privatehealth care without waiting time is an option for the patients in the publichealth queue. We show that although patients with low waiting costs...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the cost efficiency of private and public property insurance providers in Switzerland. The most commonly used measure for this kind of exercise is the Claims / Premium ratio. We argue that this measure may give strongly biased results. We develop a simple...

Finland s state-enterprise sector has been larger than in most countries and included several manufacturing companies. These were usually established because of a scarcity of private venture capital, with a mission to contribute to industrialisation. Some companies have now been privatised in a...