Firms’ political donations can induce distortions in the allocation of public procurement contracts. In this article, we employ an advanced non-parametric efficiency model to study the public sector (cost) efficiency implications of such distortions. Using a unique dataset covering the Czech...

We analyse whether, when and how local office-holders respond to the personal, economic incentives embedded in exogenously imposed population thresholds leading to an increased number and/or remuneration of local office-holders. Using data from all 589 Belgian municipalities over the period...

Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, libraries, education, police, fire protection, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage production process. In the first stage, basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) are used to generate service potential (e.g., opening hours,...

Previous work on the relation between school inputs and students' educational attainment typically fails to account for the fact that schools can adjust their grading structure, even though such actions are likely to affect students' incentives. Our theoretical model shows that, depending on...

In both public administration and economics, efficiency is brought forward as an important criterion for evaluating administrative actions. Clearly, its value as an assessment principle depends on our ability to adequately measure efficiency. This article argues that citizen's coproduction in...

Die Daten der neuen Erhebungswelle des Konstanzer Ungleichheitsbarometers zeigen, dass die Menschen in Deutschland eine weithin zunehmende Ungleichheit von Einkommen und Vermögen wahrnehmen - nicht zuletzt weil die Befragten kaum unterscheiden zwischen der Einkommensungleicheit und der in...

Data from the new wave of the Konstanz Inequality Barometer shows that people in Germany perceive a widespread increase of inequality in income and wealth and barely distinguish between income and wealth inequality. This is despite the fact that wealth inequality is significantly larger than...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

This paper studies the role of direct democracy in ensuring efficient and cost effective provision of goods and services in the public sector. The sample consists of the population of municipalities in the German State of Bavaria, where in the mid-1990s considerable direct democratic reforms...

Using instrumental variables approach this paper studies the effect of kindergarten starting age jointly with that of school starting age. We show that estimating the effect of kindergarten or school enrolment timing on later human capital outcomes separately, without taking their...