Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

This paper argues that corruption patterns are endogenous to political structures. Thus, corruption can be systemic and planned rather than decentralized and coincidental. In an economic system without law or property rights, a kleptocratic state may arise as a predatory hierarchy from a state...

The two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, not only caused enormous amounts of death, destruction and suffering, but also exposed rampant government corruption involving construction and zoning code violations. The incompetence shown by the government in providing...

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries’ institutional quality affect the shadow economy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level and changes of...

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. We show that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual realizations of benefit and costs of the project, the second game...

There is increasing recognition that corruption has substantial, adverse effects on economic growth. But if the costs of corruption are so high, why don't countries strive to improve their institutions and root out corruption? Why do many countries appear to be stuck in vicious circles of...

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...

This paper discusses about the evolution of arrears in Romania through 1995- june 2003 and try to reveal the most important causes of fiscally arrears. The study revealed that even the financial obstruction has affected initially the state companies in majority, the phenomenon has enclasped the...

Misconduct in education is a serious problem internationally. As the education sector grows, so does the scale of misconduct. The large bureaucratic apparatus, overregulation, outdated and unclear rules, and poor audit create opportunities for abuse. The blending of public sector, private firms,...