Regional productivity differences provide scope for productivity-enhancing labor mobility. Redistribution reduces relocation incentives through higher taxes or lower transfers. Combining an intensive labor supply margin with an extensive, productivity-enhancing migration margin, we determine how...

A gradually introduced reform of local government accounting made it temporarily likely for municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to avoid the effective control of their budget by the authorities in charge with overseeing local government budgets and enforcing the existing...

High employment protection in the public sector results in strategic over-employment if government divisions compete for budgets in a dynamic setting. Bureaucrats who are interested in maximising their divisions’ output employ excess labor, since this induces the sponsor to provide...

Random factors such as bad weather or exogenous economic shocks affect the re-election of politicians and can reduce accountability. Such distorted election choices interact with the architecture of government. Contrasting centralized with decentralized political systems, this study shows that...

Health care financing and funding are usually analyzed in isolation. This paper combines the corresponding strands of the literature and thereby advances our understanding of the important interaction between them. We investigate the impact of three modes of health care financing, namely,...

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of general practitioners (GPs). In the secondary care market there are two hospitals choosing quality and specialisation. Patients, who are ex ante uninformed, can...