Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

Credit Unions are cooperative financial institutions specializing in the basic financial needs of certain groups of consumers. A distinguishing feature of credit unions is the legal requirement that members share a common bond. This organizing principle recently became the focus of national...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives - that take the form of a donation received by a...

This paper uses data envelopment analys is to investigate the extent to which universities in the United States have undergone productivity and efficiency changes, partly due to managerial performance, during the 2005-09 academic years. Using panel data for 133 research and doctoral...

Poland’s productivity has grown strongly over the past decade, and efforts to reduce the regulatory burden have been significant. Despite impressive progress, product market regulation remains more burdensome than in most OECD countries, partly due to the importance of red tape and the level...

We investigate whether nonprofit and for-profit entrepreneurs share similar observable and unobservable skills. In JLE 23:649-680, 2005 "Jacks-of-all-Trades" model of entrepreneurship, individuals with more diverse academic and occupational training are more likely to become entrepreneurs, while...

The prevailing aid orthodoxy works well enough in stable environments, but is ill-equipped to navigate contexts of volatility and fragility. The orthodox approach is adept at solving straightforward technical or logistical problems (paving roads, building schools, immunizing children), but often...

Charities frequently rely on professional solicitors whose commissions exceed half of total donations. To understand this practice, we propose a principal-agent model in which the charity optimally offers a higher commission to a more “efficient” solicitor, raising the price of giving...

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been successfully used as an industrial policy tool in many countries. Efforts to create SEZs in Tanzania began in 2002, and were stepped up through the establishment of the Export Processing Zone Authority (EPZA) in 2006. A number of state-run zones are now in...

In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task. Countries like Haiti or Liberia will take many decades to reach even...