We examine how the legal protection of outside shareholders and the appropriative costs that they induce influence the incentives for private firms to go public. A higher degree of protection of shareholders can increase the appropriative costs associated with the conflict between managers and...

This work contributes to empirical studies on decentralization and corruption by trying to resolve the uncertainty that the literature so far has shown. It also gives reasons supporting the ‘best’ decentralization structure which a country can adopt to discourage corrupt behaviour, and...

This paper explores the feasibility to extend the Standard Cost Model (SCM) for calculating the costs of government regulation by taking all transaction costs into account which stem from the principal/agent relationship between regulatory authorities and economic entities. From that perspective...

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

In many cases, politicians and government officials are forbidden by law to accept monetary donations from interest groups or other outside parties as these monetary transfers are thought to cause social inefficiencies. The empirical literature supports this view as it finds a negative link...

Delegated contracting describes a widely observable agency mode where a top principal, who has no direct access to a productive downstream agent, hires an intermediary to forward a sub-contract with specified output targets and payments. The principal makes the payment to the intermediary...

State capacity is optimized when public institutions are staffed by individuals with public-service motivation. However, when motivated agents value the collective reputation of their place of employment, steady-state equilibria with both high and low aggregate motivation (reputation) in the...

This paper presents a novel theory of corruption in public procurement. It considers an agency setting of contract execution where the principal is a politician who can commit to a contract auditing policy. It is found that a benevolent politician, by choosing a sufficiently strict auditing,...

Whistle-blowing is usually regarded as a way to identify abuse and wrongdoing on the part of governments and corporations. In this paper we show how, at a micro level, whistle-blowing can be used as a designer tool to prevent opportunistic behavior, that takes the form of collusion or blackmail,...

This paper studies how information control affects incentives for collusion and optimal organizational structures in principal-supervisor-agent relationships. I consider a model in which the principal designs the supervisor's signal on the productive agent's private information and the...