Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) constitute a major source of innovative knowledge for small- and medium-sized enterprises. In regional innovation systems, KIBS play a crucial role in distributing innovations and improving the region's overall innovative capacities. While the...

The liturgical system in Classical Athens (479-322 BCE) privately provided public goods, including naval defense. I use it to evaluate mechanism design policies and to address uncertainties in the historical record by adding predictive economic theory to research by ancient historians. I...

In every democracy mass media play a crucial role in assuring the effective working of the political system. In this paper I focus on the role of media as "watchdog". In an agency relationship between politician and citizens, media perform the function of an informed supervisor. Previous works...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

This paper uses a principal-agent model to investigate how public school managers react to government incentives based on previous school performance. Using data from the Brazilian Student Evaluation Exam (Prova Brasil - PB) and the School Census, we estimate a managerial effort function by...

This paper uses a principal-agent model to investigate how public school managers react to government incentives based on previous school performance. Using data from the Brazilian Student Evaluation Exam (Prova Brasil -- PB) and the School Census, we estimate a managerial effort function by...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

If local public goods exhibit spillovers and regions are sufficiently symmetric, decentralization implies under provision, whereas cooperative centralization is associated with strict Pareto-improvement. This classic inference rests on two assumptions: local politicians are delegated sincerely...

We consider ultimatum bargaining over the provision of a public good. Offer-maker and responder can delegate their decisions to agents, whose actual decision rules are opaque. We show that the responder will benefit from strategic opacity, even with bilateral delegation. The incomplete...

We model competition on a credence market governed by an imperfect label, signaling high quality, as a rank-order tournament between firms. In this market interaction, asymmetric firms jointly and competitively control the underlying quality ranking's precision by releasing individual...