At KSG, we are asking whether the skills and capacities--and therefore training--of public officials must be reconceived as governance responsibilities migrate away from the central state to other locations. The question itself assumes that we have a settled understanding of which skills and...

Audits are an important legal accountability tool used by resource providers (donors, grantors, and others) to assure that resources are spent by nonprofit organizations in accordance with the resource provider’s intentions. This paper reports on audits that are required by the government of...

Since the early Nineties, a dozen states have established broad-based merit aid programs. The typical program waives tuition and fees at public colleges and universities in one’s home state. Unlike traditional merit programs, such as the National Merit Scholarship, this aid requires relatively...

In 2001, China’s Ministry of Education launched a new graduate program in public administration at twenty-four universities around the country, with the explicit goal of improving management and policy-making skills in the public sector. From the beginning, these professional training schools...

Recommender and reputation systems seek to inform potential customers by securing current consumers' feedback about products and sellers. This paper proposes a payment-based system to induce honest reporting of feedback. The system applies proper scoring rules to each buyer's report, looking to...

This paper draws on American experience with four categories of market-based instruments for environmental protection: charge systems; tradeable permits; market friction reduction; and government subsidy reduction. The paper examines normative and positive lessons that can be learned from these...

Electronic government and electronic civics embrace a wide range of topics. Electronic government and electronic civics include in their purview the development, use, and implications of new practices, processes, forms and interests in government and civic life occasioned by the Internet, World...

Does student financial aid increase college attendance, or simply subsidize costs for infra-marginal students? Settling the question empirically is a challenge, because aid is correlated with many characteristics that influence schooling decisions. A shift in financial aid policy that affects...

First Amendment doctrine has traditionally been carved along conceptual rather than institutional lines. Legal categories like “public forum,” “content-neutral,” and “defamation” have dominated the doctrine, with the general understanding being that it was the nature of the speech or...

Developing countries traditionally experience passthrough of exchange rate changes that is greater and more rapid than high-income countries experience. This is true equally of the determination of prices of imported goods, prices of local competitors’ products, and the general CPI. But...