Sub-standard quality is a recurrent problem within parts of the human services - in the care for frail elderly, mentally ill, the intellectually disabled, and children in need - and within law enforcement. Service quality is of great concern to the individual, and the larger society. If so...

This paper documents the financial and institutional developments of China during the past two decades, when China was successfully transformed from a rigid centralplanning economy to a dynamic market economy following its unique path. We empirically examine the relationship between financial...

The Condorcet Jury Theorem is derived from the implicit assumption that jury members only commit one type of error. If the probability of this error is smaller than 0.5, then group decisions are better than those of individual members. In binary decision situations, however, two types of error...

The US Supreme Court's overruling of the pre-existing per se illegality of resale price maintenance and the recommendation of a rule of reason approach in the Leegin decision (2007), raise the question whether other jurisdictions should follow this approach and what future assessments of resale...

In competition law, the problem of the optimal design of institutional and procedural rules concerns assessment processes of the pro- and anticompetitiveness of business behaviors. This is well recognized in the discussion about the relative merits of different assessment principles such as the...

In this study, we analyze a client's choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for cases. The distinguishing feature is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they wish. We find robust evidence that bids offering hourly rates are less attractive to clients. Our...

We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed...

Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public’s perceptions of government’s performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different...

The abolishment of passport and any other type of border controls at the German-Polish and German-Czech border in December 2007 provoked public concerns that open border would increase cross-border crime. Despite these widespread concerns, empirical research on whether the public fears were...

The nexus between corruption and economic growth has been examined for a long time. Many empirical studies measured corruption by the reversed Transparency International's Perception of Corruption Index (CPI) and ignored that the CPI was not comparable over time. The CPI is comparable over time...