Showing 1 - 10 of 856
This paper studies the role of governments and its link to trust. We argue that the public's trust strongly depends on governments delivering on their core tasks in a market economy. In some economies, a neglect of core tasks can be observed and there seems to be some erosion, notably in terms...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011825240
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009488951
In this paper we analyze the influence of direct democratic institutions on the size and development of the shadow economies. The framework developed predicts a negative relationship between the degree of direct democracy and the size of the shadow economy. Countries where direct democratic...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009503812
We analyze whether or not the globalization of capital, "disciplines" governments and improves governance. We demonstrate that globalization affects governance, by increasing a country's vulnerability to sudden capital flight. This increased threat of capital flight can discipline governments...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009488923
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 entrepreneurs...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011343756
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013482661
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013542947
In a country with weak institutional constraints on the executive, the real power might belong to the government bureaucracy rather than to an autocratic leader. We combine the Aghion-Tirole definition of formal and real authority with the Barro-Ferejohn model of political agency to study the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010199719
This paper examines how managers at the top of a public institution, central bank executives, allocate their working time. Using detailed information from personal diaries of the six members of the European Central Bank's Executive Board over a period of two years, we codify and analyze more...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011962284
In this paper we first use two international data sets to investigate how governance, political and economic factors influence corporate tax rates. We show that institutional and political factors matter: good governance reduces the tax rate; a parliamentary system, especially a plurality...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003923754