Performance tables for UK secondary schools have been published annually since 1992. In 2003, for the first time, these tables additionally include a measure of the educational 'value added' by a school to its pupils. This paper provides the first large scale analysis of the likely impact of the...

In all health care systems exists governmental regulation, as the market for health is unanimously regarded as imperfect. The German health care market is a good example for strongly regulated market in nearly each submarket, partially the determination of prices. Reimbursement of health goods...

This paper implements both stochastic production and cost frontier analyses to estimate the efficiency of toll motorway companies in Spain, the country with the largest number of private concessionaires in this economic sector. Our dataset includes 32 concessionaires with different features for...

Public services are a key facet of everyday life for all citizens and societies, so it is surprising that only scant attention has been paid to the emergence of the new approaches to them in an increasingly integrated EU. We critically examine these new approaches in this article. We show how...

How should the different tasks in an infrastructure project be allocated to private and public agents, respectively? Traditionally, building the physical asset is assigned to private partners whereas financing and operation are carried out by the public sector. But even if building, operation,...

On average, nearly $46 billion of property is given to charitable organizations each year, about twenty-five percent of the total charitable deduction. This makes the charitable contribution deduction for property a tax expenditure within a tax expenditure, yet it is rarely analyzed as such. It...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, municipal governments in various US cities assumed responsibility for utilities and other services that previously had been privately operated. In the late twentieth century, prompted by fiscal crisis and encouraged by neo-liberal ideology,...

This paper examines the role of privatization on the cost of government-provided services. We examine data on the cost of housing public and private prisoners from all 50 states over the time period 1996-2004, and find that the existence of private prisons in a state reduces the growth in per...

Compensation for adjudicators is generally considered as a core issue for judicial independence and for attracting good judges in the institutional design for courts. This paper examines compensation systems for adjudicators and dispute settlement administrators in investor-state dispute...

The 2004 election year provided many focus points for those interested in stem cell research and its potential outcomes. California's Proposition 71, in particular, has arguably led the way to a new era of state and local public funding of stem cell research. This article does not address the...