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...

Many street-level bureaucrats (such as caseworkers) have the dual task of helping some clients, while sanctioning others. We develop a model of such a street-level bureaucracy and study the implications of its personnel policy on the self-selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ...

The U.S. has been under pressure to abandon the unique first-to-invent feature of its patent law for awarding patents. The opposition to reform however argues that switch to a first-to-file rule, the international norm, will undermine innovation. We evaluate this argument in a dynamic stochastic...

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...

This paper examines the relationship between faculty participation in university decision making and university performance. Using an aggregated measure of faculty participation, McCormick and Meiners (1988) find that increased faculty control in decision making is associated with lower levels...

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...

Der Beitrag untersucht den physischen und digitalen Zugang zu Finanzdienstleistungen der öffentlich-rechtlichen Sparkassen in Deutschland, um zu beurteilen, ob die durch den Filialrückbau bewirkte reduzierte Präsenz in der Fläche durch digitale Angebote kompensiert werden kann. Die physische...

A well established belief both in the game-theoretic IO and in policy debates is that market concentration facilitates collusion. We show that this piece of conventional wisdom relies upon the assumption of profit-seeking behaviour, for it may be reversed when firms pursue other plausible goals....

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...

This study examines the effect of a one-on-one outsourced pre-lending consulting service on the repayment behavior of microcredit borrowers in Korea with administrative data from the Smile Microcredit Bank. A random change in the cut-off loan amount for mandatory consulting is utilized as an...