State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often justified for correcting market failures, providing essential public services, and fulfilling social objectives. Yet, SOEs face unique governance challenges as agency conflicts usually increase with state ownership. This paper examines Brazil's efforts to...

This paper presents and comparatively analyzes three case studies of productive development agencies (PDAs) in Brazil: Embrapa, Finep, and ABC Foundation. Following a discussion of the main hypotheses and the methodology employed, the paper describes each case, the related counterfactual and an...

The challenge of public administration reform is well-known: politicians often have little interest in the efficient implementation of government policy. Using new data from 439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries, we demonstrate that such reforms are significantly less likely...

This paper examines new data on public sector employees from 18 Latin American countries to shed light on the role of trust in the performance of government agencies. We developed an original survey taken during the first COVID-19 wave that includes randomized experiments with pandemic-related...

This paper analyzes the impact of Mapa- Regalías on efficiency in the execution of public investment projects in Colombia. MapaRegalías is an online platform that displays geo-referenced information and data on royalties coming from the extractives sector. The purpose of the platform is to...

This paper analyzes the impact of MapaRegalías on efficiency in the execution of public investment projects in Colombia. MapaRegalías is an online platform that displays geo-referenced information and data on royalties coming from the extractives sector. The purpose of the platform is to...

We exploit new experimental and quasi-experimental data to investigate voters' intrinsic motivation to engage politically. Does having the right to vote increase engagement or, given significant incentives to free ride, do eligible voters remain rationally unengaged? Does knowledge that one's...

Theory suggests that employee trust is key to productivity in organizations, but empirical evidence documenting links between trust and constraints on performance is scarce. This paper analyzes self-collected data on public sector employees from eighteen Latin American countries and Önds that...

This paper analyses the cyclicality of fiscal policy (discretionary versus automatic) for 28 advanced economies over 1995-2021 by paying special attention to the Covid-19 crisis. We find evidence that discretionary fiscal policy during the Covid-19 crisis (2020-2021) was significantly more...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the 26 Swiss cantons over the period 2000 to 2004 applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). A Total Public Sector Performance (TPSP) indicator for eight local government activities (administration, public safety, education, culture and...