Who should own public projects? We report data from a laboratory experiment with 480 participants that was designed to test Besley and Ghatak's (2001) public-good version of the Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory. Consider two parties, one of whom can invest in the provision of a public...

The canonical principal-agent problem involves a risk-neutral principal who must use incentives to motivate a risk-averse agent to take a costly, unobservable action that improves the principal's payoff. The standard solution requires an inefficient shifting of risk to the agent. This paper,...

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...

A government agency wants an infrastructure-based public service to be provided. Our experimental study compares two different modes of provision. In a public–private partnership, the two tasks of building the infrastructure and operating it are delegated to one private contractor (a...

This paper compares the effectiveness of public and private providers of employment services. Reporting from a randomized field experiment conducted in Denmark we assess empirically the case for contracting out employment services for a well-defined group of highly educated job-seekers...

Interventions aimed at increasing priority for employee safety could lead to better safety climate and safety behavior of employees. However, current studies reporting on safety climate interventions lack diversity in contexts and settings, they focus mainly on supervisors and do not take into...

This paper is a contribution to the worldwide media reform movement, which is seeking ways to reverse the decline of public interest journalism, especially the in-depth coverage of political issues that is needed for healthy democracies. Several prominent thinkers are advocating similar reforms,...

This paper uses a survey of 130 public laboratories in France to investigate collaborative activities of laboratories with industry. Our statistical analysis shows that knowledge and technology development and transfer occurs most frequently through collaborative and contract research, informal...

When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether experts strategically use language to communicate numeric estimates in order to persuade receivers....

When faced with the choice of behaving corruptly, are people more willing to accept a bribe or to embezzle money? Situations of bribery and embezzlement usually differ in their decision-making dynamics, with bribery requiring coordination between decision-makers (i.e., briber and bribee) while...