The Peace pillar of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development encompasses a diverse range of issues including stability and effective governance. Reforming the public sector is high on the government’s agenda, but involves a number of challenges: the gap between planning and implementation...

Föderalismus und Dezentralisierung sind Themen, die weltweit einen festen Platz auf der politischen Agenda einnehmen. Dezentralisierungsprozesse treten bspw. verstärkt in zahlreichen osteuropäischen Staaten aber auch in Spanien, Belgien und in und vielen Entwicklungsländern auf. Diese...

Privatization of services that were formerly provided by governmental agencies has been an important issue for both local and national governments. The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of privatization in the context of the provision of a public good such as street cleaning and...

Föderalismus und Dezentralisierung sind Themen, die weltweit einen festen Platz auf der politischen Agenda einnehmen. Dezentralisierungsprozesse treten bspw. verstärkt in zahlreichen osteuropäischen Staaten aber auch in Spanien, Belgien und in und vielen Entwicklungsländern auf. Diese...

This essay is concerned only with the emigration of Arab elites (brain drain), which is vastly different from the mass economic migration of workers to Europe, the U.S. and rich countries. The main assumption is that the scary state of Arab societies at political, social and cultural levels, is...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state's centroid to instrument for the concentration of population around the capital...

Anti-corruption will feature prominently in Turkey's talks on EU accession. Despite claims to the contrary, the data show that corruption levels in Turkey are not radically different than those in many other accession countries. While Turkey already meets many of the requirements for negotiating...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...

Although tax non-filing and the resulting tax evasion are a challenge to public welfare, particularly in developing countries, scholarly knowledge on taxable citizens who do not register as taxpayers, also known as the ‘ghosts’, is minimal. To expand this knowledge base, this empirical paper...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...