In recent years, social media has become a major venue for the interplay between citizens and public sector organizations, in order to facilitate corporate dialog. However, not much comprehensive research has been done on how interactivity between local governments and citizens takes shape....

This paper studies the role of a lender of last resort (LLR) in a monetary model where a shortage of bank’s monetary reserves (or a banking panic) occurs endogenously. We show that while a discount window policy introduced by the LLR is welfare improving, it reduces the banks’ ex ante...

This paper investigates how social interactions impact the decision to participate in one’s local environment. Existing work often reports correlations between social interactions and local participation, but it is unclear what the causal direction of this relationship is. A key contribution...

In finance, durations between successive transactions are usually modelled by the autoregressive conditional duration model based on a continuous distribution omitting frequent zero values. Zero durations can be caused by either split transactions or independent transactions. We propose a...

This paper discusses the implications of autonomous-connected-electric-shared vehicles (ACES) for public finance, which have so far been widely ignored. In OECD countries, 5-12% of federal and up to 30% of local tax revenue are currently from fuel and vehicle taxation. The diffusion of ACES will...

Africa's interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...

Congestion levels have grown substantially in recent years, while the traditional economic response to congestion – road pricing – remains politically infeasible in most locations. Tradable permits are likely to be a more viable alternative, because they do not require a net financial flow...

This paper develops a novel approach to the economic evaluation of public policies: participatory value evaluation (PVE). PVE involves citizens directly in decisions of the government, taking into account governmental and individual budget constraints. Citizens receive reliable information on...

Using laboratory experiments, we compare the stability of bidding rings in the English auction and the first-price sealed-bid auction in a heterogeneous-value setting. In both a re-matching condition and a fixed-matching condition, we observe that biddings rings are more stable in the English...

Financial protection is claimed to be an important objective of health policy. Yet there is a lack of clarity about what it is and no consensus on how to measure it. I address the ambiguity of meaning by considering three questions: Protection of what? Protection against what? Protection with...