Social impact bonds (SIBs) are an innovative financing mechanism for public goods. In a SIB, an investor provides capital to a service provider for a social intervention. The investor receives a return based on the outcome of the intervention relative to a predetermined benchmark. We describe...

Changes in political boundaries aimed at devolving power to local governments are common in many countries. We examine the economic consequences of redistricting through the creation of smaller government units. Exploiting reforms that led to sharp variations in the number of government units in...

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

We review the literature on public sector outsourcing to explore if the theoretical predictions from the incomplete contracts literature hold up to recent empirical evidence. Guided by theory, we arrange services according to the type and magnitude of their contractibility problems. The...

This paper develops a theory of the allocation of authority between two parties that produce impure public goods. We show that the optimal allocation depends on technological factors, the parties' valuations of the goods produced, and the degree of impurity of these goods. When the degree of...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

Citizens in low income democracies depend, to a large extent, on the state for the provision of basic services either due to absence of a market for these services or poverty. This paper synthesizes the findings of the International Growth Centre (IGC) supported research on governance and public...

We study the effect of reducing barriers to accessing non-police services on the demand for police services in cases of police-reported domestic violence. Variation comes from a large randomized controlled trial designed to assist victims in accessing non-police services and we link information...

This paper tests for discriminatory treatment of the Roma minority by public officials in the Czech Republic at the stage of initial contact preceding a potential application for unemployment benefit. Our correspondence experiment facilitates testing for the presence of each of two intertwined...

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from...