In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public employment decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections substitute for individual competence. Relying on detailed matched employer-employee data on the universe of public...

Outsourcing public services to private providers is heralded for increasing government efficiency. Yet, outsourcing also offers opportunities to circumvent employment regulations in the public sector. The praised flexibility that private contractors have to hire employees can also be used to...

We investigate the relationship between the time politicians stay in office and the functioning of public procurement. To this purpose, we collect a data set on the Italian municipal governments and all the procurement auctions they administered between 2000 and 2005. Identification is achieved...

We study project development and selection by an organization whose members prefer different projects. The organization faces a basic trade-off between fostering collaboration among its members and efficiently adapting its decisions to its circumstances. If the organization commits to choosing...

This article responds to the question: "Capitalism: What has gone wrong, what needs to change and how to fix it" for a special volume on capitalism in Oxford Review of Economic Policy. Debates on capitalism get muddled by blind spots about essential institutions, particularly effective...

When a principal’s monitoring information is private (non-verifiable), the agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information to reduce the agent’s wage or collect a monetary penalty. Restoring credibility may lead to an extreme waste of resources - the so-called...

In several strategy documents, the Department of Defense has suggested that it may experiment with public-private partnerships (P3s) as catalysts for innovation. This policy is misguided. P3s may prove especially disappointing if they are merely a neologism for a continuation of the same old...