Showing 1 - 10 of 524
Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456586
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/10012465302
Municipal unions may often use their own votes and those of sympathetic fellow citizens to promote increases in demand for municipal services. If successful, this strategy can increase member employment levels without sacrificing compensation. Municipal employee unionization significantly...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477351
Public finance theories of the median voter's preferences and local public sector rent extraction posit that liberal cities and high amenity cities will feature a larger, better paid local public sector. Compensating differentials theory predicts that real wages will be lower in beautiful states...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455480
We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013435109
Using a large, unique dataset on the Chinese housing market, we propose to measure corruption using the price differences paid by bureaucrat buyers and non-bureaucrat buyers in the housing market. We find that the housing price paid by bureaucrat buyers is on average 1.05 percentage points lower...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012458349
Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local leadership could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to impressing/pleasing their evaluator, relative to working...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013462670
America's local governments spend about one-eighth of our national income, one-fourth of total government spending, and employ over 14 million people. This paper surveys the large and growing economics literature on local governments and their finances. A primary difference between local and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460416
This paper uses historical census data from Burkina Faso to characterize local demographic pressures associated with internal migration into river valleys after Onchocerciasis eradication, combined with a new survey of village elders to document change over time and differences across villages...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460939
This paper revisits the classic argument that a system of local governments financing public service provision via property taxes will produce an efficient allocation of both housing and services if communities can implement zoning ordinances. The novel feature of the analysis is a dynamic model...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012461513