The scope of public human resource policy is outlined. Motivation for the need of transparency in this policy is provided in terms of informational asymmetries, human capital externalities, and long planning horizons. Transparency is defined both along a time dimension – ex ante and ex post...

Parochial politics is typically associated with poor leadership and low levels of public good provision. This paper explores the possibility that community involvement in politics need not necessarily worsen governance and, indeed, can be efficiency-enhancing when the context is appropriate....

There is a strong consensus among economists and public pension experts that many public pensions are substantially underfunded and that absent fundamental reform many state and local governments will have to resort to some mixture of tax increases, budget cuts, and/or bailouts. While many...

Failure of reforms is typical, and a success is extremely rare. This article analyzes the causes of this phenomenon. Many reform proposals are based on mistakable postulates concerning, in particular, interconnections of economic and political institutions. Reform often used as a tool for rent...

I discuss goals of institutional experimentation as well as obstacles for its realization. The special attention is given to regional experiments. Institutional experiment reduces transformation costs, in particular, by diminishing probability of formation of erroneous reforms trap. The analyses...

It is a typical case in the practice of reforms, when a reformer, who seeks to introduce an institution with desired properties, discovers that its immediate implementation is impossible because of resource, technological, cultural, political or institutional constraints. In this case, one has...

Occupational licensing is among the fastest-growing labor market institutions in the U.S. economy. One of the key features of occupational licensing is that the law determines who gets to do the work. In those cases where universally licensed occupations are both complements to and substitutes...

We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In...