To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

This paper shows that the public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, and thereby have an instrument...

Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image...

Practitioners and scholars of public administration currently seem to have overcome comprehensive reform strategies and are focusing their attention on minor changes in public administration that generate short-term outcomes with lower transactional costs. In that sense, many have argued that...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

To what extent does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better economic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works, by combining contract-level data on procurement performance and bureau-level data on competence and...

We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which they support health infrastructure projects. Using exogenous variation in soil texture, we...

In this paper we examine how Finnish municipalities' expenditures depend on the share of citizens with foreign background out of the total population. Empirical analyses make use of Finnish panel data from 295 municipalities and 202 migrant nationalities for the period 1987- 2018. It turns out...

This study examines whether the fiscal multiplier can be negative for certain types of government spending. The key result is that the fiscal multiplier can be negative if there is a high degree of substitutability between private and government consumption and government consumption is...

I analyse the welfare impact of a mixed market with a public or private firm with some degree of altruism, in the presence of an agency problem. Contrary to some earlier findings, the total surplus turns out to be increasing in the degree of altruism. This impact is stronger than if there is no...