We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous...

This paper shows how the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) can guide treatment allocation to improve social welfare. Under budget constraints, the optimal treatment targets individuals with MVPFs above a threshold that minimizes the opportunity cost of treatment. Using experimental data, we...

In markets with budget-constrained buyers, competitive equilibria need not be efficient in the utilitarian sense, or maximise the seller's revenue. We consider a setting with multiple divisible goods. Competitive equilibrium outcomes, and only those, are constrained utilitarian efficient, a...