We investigate the relationship between the time politicians stay in office and the functioning of public procurement. To this purpose, we collect a data set on the Italian municipal governments and all the procurement auctions they administered between 2000 and 2005. Identification is achieved...

The paper deals with the effects of local governments' interference with business affairs of publicly owned utilities. A partial model is presented to illustrate the consequences of "democratic control" for the public managers' effort and the efficiency of local public production. To check the...

It is the prevailing approach in the public choice literature to model lobbying and corruption in the same manner. On the contrary, we attempt to capture both in the same framework (auction theory), but using different modelling approaches. We present a unified framework in which some...

Do Empires affect human values and behavior long after their demise? In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone border of the Habsburg Empire have been sharing common formal institutions for 90 years now. We exploit this geographic discontinuity in a...

We consider an argument that it might be helpful to combat poverty in developing countries indirectly by enlisting firms' help (as corporate citizens) in reducing corruption. It turns out that this argument crucially depends on a fair number of presmises, including (a) a common interest of firms...

In this paper we investigate the role of judicial control of lobbying activities in an endogenous policy framework, focusing on two dimensions of quality of the judiciary, namely efficiency and integrity. We present a multi-layer lobbying model where a self-interested group is allowed to inuence...

The `Four-Eyes-Principle' (4EP) (business has to be conducted by at least two individuals, hence four eyes) is seen as one of the most potent measures against corruption although it lacks any theoretical or empirical justification. We show in a laboratory experiment that the net effect of the...

The determinants of incentive regulation are a key issue in industrial policy. I study an asymmetric information model of incentive rules selection by a political principal endowed with an information-gathering technology whose efficiency increases with the effort exerted by two accountable...

A great deal of attention has been paid in the literature to estimating the impacts of training programs. Much less attention has been devoted to how training agencies assign participants to training programs, and to how these allocation decisions vary with agency resources, the initial skill...

This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led Barro (2004) to analyze the connections between some dimensions of...