We assembled a large panel of project-level technical and financial data and country-level economic, institutional, political, and governance variables to assess the determinants of private financing of infrastructure in emerging markets and developing economies. Controlling for economic...

We assembled a large panel of project-level technical and financial data and country-level economic, institutional, political, and governance variables to assess the determinants of private financing of infrastructure in emerging markets and developing economies. Controlling for economic...

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. It is shown that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual real-izations of benefit and costs of the project, the second...

This paper examines interactions between self-interested agents in a two-tier government hierarchy, consisting of a central authority and bureaucrats in a two-stage game, where the actions of agents affect private sector allocations. Conditions under which lower-tier corruption arises as an...

We develop a framework to empirically examine how politicians with electoral pressures control bureaucrats with career concerns as well as the consequences for bureaucrats' career investments. Unique micro-level data on Indian bureaucrats support our key predictions. Politicians use frequent...

Is work overload a friction to public agencies? Using data on R&D procurements, patents, and contracting units from a US federal agency, we investigate how officer workload impacts innovation procurement outcomes. Unanticipated retirement shifts provide an exogenous source of variation that we...

The crafting of new international regulatory directives is often done within international organizations (IOs). This paper shows how a public choice framework can explain this trend. Models of bureaucracy are presented against which the conditions and incentives of international bureaucrats are...

We build a model to investigate the interaction between trade, the supply of law and order, and the nature of governing political institutions. To supply law and order necessary for a representative merchant to create wealth, a ruler (i) appoints officials capable of coercion and (ii) introduces...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...