While effective bureaucracy is crucial for state capacity, its decision-making remains a black box. We elicit preferences of 900+ real-world public procurement officials in Finland and Germany. This is an important pursuit as they report having sizeable discretion and minimal extrinsic...

Centralization of public procurement can lower prices for the government's direct purchase of goods and services. This paper focuses on indirect savings. Public administrations that do not procure directly through a central procurement agency might benefit from the availability of...

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 complementary...

This study empirically investigates the transposition patterns of EU directives in all 15 member states and in six major sectors of the economy with a view on analysing the political-economic reasons behind sector and national differences in the legal transposition instruments used. In...

In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

Formal and informal institutions are often viewed as complements or substitutes in empirical and theoretical works. However, no evidence of complementarities or substitutes is found in our empirical analysis of the interrelation between formal and informal decentralization across 64 provinces of...

This paper, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., develops a simple and innovative model to evaluate the performance of local government in the provision of local public services. The model employs a reduced set of information and fewer assumptions than traditional...

We investigate whether public and private sector employees differ in terms of public service motivation using a representative sample of elderly workers from 12 European countries. We find that public sector workers, both those currently employed and those already retired, are significantly more...

Numerous countries are introducing citizen feedback schemes to tame corruption. We study how best to incorporate feedback in public officials’ incentives. The main novelty of our proposal is to allow citizens to directly influence officials’ pay. We consider a situation in which...