In many developing countries (and beyond), public sector workers are not just simply implementers of policies designed by the politicians in charge of supervising them-so called agents and principals, respectively. Public sector workers can have the power to influence whether politicians are...

Attempts to maintain prices different from those that would otherwise be determined by supply and demand are virtually guaranteed to result in illegal behaviour, including in the case of laws that determine the salaries of civil servants. In Indonesia, private sector salaries are highly...

This paper argues that better governance practices can reduce the costs, risks and uncertainty of financial intermediation. Our sample covers high-, middle- and low-income countries before and after the global financial crisis (GFC). We find that net interest margins of banks are lower if...