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 positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a perfectly...

We use a novel identification strategy to shed light on the effect of grant funding. We focus on charities that applied to a UK lottery grant programme. Where charities score the same on formal criteria, it is likely that informal criteria orthogonal to quality are used to break the ties,...

A number of papers have suggested that pro-social behaviour in the workplace may be sensitive to the institutional environment, but there is little empirical research that attempts to test this directly using data on worker behaviour. This is the aim of this paper. We show that individuals in...

A number of papers have suggested that pro-social behaviour in the workplace may be sensitive to the institutional environment, but there is little empirical research that attempts to test this directly using data on worker behaviour. This is the aim of this paper. We show that individuals in...

Performance targets are commonly used in the public sector, despite their well known problems when organisations have multiple objectives and performance is difficult to measure. It is possible that such targets may work where there is considerable consensus that performance needs to be...