Given the intensive and ideologically charged debate over the use of private contractors for publicly funded services, it is somewhat surprising that many social scientists have preferred to explain government outsourcing by the pursuit of economic efficiency. Starting out from different...

Thinking about Ronald Coase, economists generally refer to transaction and social costs, to the importance of property rights and institutions or to the Coase-theorem. Examine his work more closely, a common feature takes shape behind these ideas, the public utilities. The constant and detailed...

Energy industries are mainly organised at national level in Hungary, however local governments have their specific role in the system. Local governments have been major performers in the first period of the transition process: they were entitled to receive 25 per cent of the shares in electric...

Several decades of market opening has become a characteristic of network industries. Its main hindrances and aids has come into sight during this period. There is a need now to evaluate the process of market opening and to assess the steps to be taken. Market opening is usually measured by...

This paper studies oligopolistic competition in education markets when schools can be private and public and when the quality of education depends on peer group effects. In the first stage of our game schools set their quality and in the second stage they fix their tuition fees. We examine how...

This paper estimates the relative multi-factor productivity (MFP) of privatized and state-owned enterprises using a long panel on all initially state-owned manufacturing firms in Ukraine. The large size and length of the time series in the data permit us to track the privatization process and to...

This paper compares the effectiveness of public and private providers of employment services. Reporting from a randomized field experiment conducted in Denmark we assess empirically the case for contracting out employment services for a well-defined group of highly educated job-seekers...

We provide the first test of the Hoff and Stiglitz (2004) model predicting whether and under what conditions mass privatizations are accompanied by asset stripping. In addition to directly testing the theory, we also tackle an important policy-oriented issue of why a large number of efficient...

The nonprofit sector's share of wage and salary employment in the U.S. has increased over time, from about 5½ percent in the mid-1990s to 7 percent in 2015. This paper surveys the literature and presents new evidence on the employment and earnings of workers in the nonprofit sector since 1994....