This paper explores whether public investment crowds out or crowds in private investment. To this aim, we build a database of about half a million firms from 49 countries. We find that the effect of public investment on corporate investment depends both on leverage and financial constraints....

Stefanie Gäbler prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The study was completed in March 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of six distinct empirical essays...

Spending on public administration itself is relatively low and so are indicators of its performance. Challenges include wastage in public procurement, insufficient management of the investment cycle and high levels of staff turnover. This paper considers ways of building on recent reforms,...

The paper is an exploratory historical analysis, based on documentary research and literature review, which focuses on the formation of the bureaucratic apparatus in the area of economic infrastructure, analyzed from the perspective of the construction of the Brazilian State and its technical,...

The strength of the United Kingdom’s central finance agency (H.M. Treasury) has been attributed to its broad and powerful influence on policy issues; the high intellectual standards of its staff; the relatively clear division between the “official” treasury and the political level; and the...

The challenge for fiscal policy in Slovakia is to achieve fiscal consolidation in a way which supports the fragile recovery and protects spending on areas which are important for re-embarking on a trajectory of high trend growth and underpinning a catch-up in living standards. While the recently...

This study explores explanations for costs increases during the front-end of road projects, which includes the planning stages up until the project execution starts, through an analysis of project governance and cost-estimation practice in the Norwegian Public Road Administration. We group the...

Infrastructure costs in the United States are high and rising. The procurement process is one potential cost driver. In this paper we conduct a survey of procurement practices across the 50 states. We survey both employees at each state department of transportation (DOT) and the road builders...