A key issue in strategic management in the public sector is how government creates economic and social value through procurement. Unfortunately, most procurement studies are based on contract theories, which fail to incorporate the growing role of strategic management in performance. We fill...

Recent empirical studies suggest that poor public sector performance in developing nations is due in part to the difficultly of selecting workers whose motivation is aligned with the mission of the institution -- in direct contrast to evidence from developed nations, public sector workers tend...

State capacity is optimized when public institutions are staffed by individuals with public-service motivation. However, when motivated agents value the collective reputation of their place of employment, steady-state equilibria with both high and low aggregate motivation (reputation) in the...

We study the long-run implications of regional and ethnic favoritism in Africa. Combining geocoded individual-level survey data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with data on national leaders’ birthplaces across 41 African countries, we explore the educational attainment of adults...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

How should students be assigned to schools? Two mechanisms have been suggested and implemented around the world: deferred acceptance (DA) and top trading cycles (TTC). These two mechanisms are widely considered excellent choices because they are strategy-proof, in addition to DA's no justified...

This paper studies how the swiftness and delay of punishment affect behavior. Using rich administrative data from automated speed cameras, we exploit two (quasi-)experimental sources of variation in the time between a speeding offense and the sending of a ticket. At the launch of the speed...

Promise competition is prevalent in many economic environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. We study the value of transparency for promise competition and ask whether promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations when outcomes do not allow for observing...

The novel partial-use philosophy by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision initiates a paradigm shift for banks, allowing them to permanently partially apply the internal ratings-based approach (IRBA) and not having to fully roll it out across the overall bank anymore. This raises the...