Showing 1 - 10 of 315
Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005830392
The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of … implications of the theory and identify the causal effect of larger federal transfers on political corruption and the observed … transfers increase political corruption and reduce the quality of candidates for mayor. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008622357
Tropical deforestation accounts for almost one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and threatens the world's most diverse ecosystems. The prevalence of illegal forest extraction in the tropics suggests that understanding the incentives of local bureaucrats and politicians who enforce...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009294894
We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998-2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly persistent over time....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009359896
Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009359917
Recent research has suggested that the reduction of entry regulation can promote firm entry and job creation, but little is known about the quality of firms and jobs created through these reforms. To shed light on this question, we employ data from Portugal, a country which implemented one of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008683279
Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists' ability to measure corruption. This, in turn, has led to a … new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in … light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009278235
This paper investigates the impact of elite capture on the allocation of targeted government welfare programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and non-experimental data on a variety of existing government transfer programs....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796586
Government corruption is more prevalent in poor countries than in rich countries. This paper uses cross …-industry heterogeneity in growth rates within Vietnam to test empirically whether growth leads to lower corruption. We find that it does. We … results suggest that as poor countries grow, corruption could subside "on its own,'' and they demonstrate one type of positive …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796606
Using a large, unique dataset on the Chinese housing market, we propose to measure corruption using the price … driven by alternative explanations, thus they are evidence of corruption and measures of the market value of government power. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010798421