In a public procurement setting, we discuss the desirability of completing contracts with state-contingent clauses providing for monetary compensations to the contractor when revenue shocks occur. Realized shocks are private information of the contractor and this creates agency costs of...

Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of good management for firm performance. Here, we focus on management in not-for-profits (NFPs). We present a model predicting that management quality will be lower in NFPs compared to for-profits (FPs), but that outputs may not be worse if...

In a public procurement setting, we discuss the desirability of completing contracts with state-contingent clauses providing for monetary compensations to the contractor when revenue shocks occur. Realized shocks are private information of the contractor and this creates agency costs of...

Besley and Ghatak (2001) show that public good should be owned by the agent who values the public good most — irrespective of technological factors. In this paper we relax their assumptions in a natural way by allowing the agents to be indispensable and show that relative valuations are not...

We analyze the reform of public sector welfare services such as education. In this paper we compare a mix of private and a public service provider with full privatization. In both cases the suppliers specialize in serving particular customer types. In the mixed institution the government sets...

This paper analyzes the effect of reputation on ownership of public goods in the Besley and Ghatak (2001) model. We show that in the dynamic setup the optimal ownership depends not only on the relative valuations for the public good but also on technology (elasticity of investment). We also show...

We model alternative institutional arrangements for building and managing facilities for provision of public services, including the use of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), by exploring the effects on innovative investment activity by providers. The desirability of bundling the building and...

We use an incomplete-contract approach to compare contracting out by a public sector agency with the delegation of contracting out to a public-private partnership (PPP) that is a joint venture between private and sector agents. The PPP maximizes a linear combination of profit and social benefit....

In an incomplete contract setting, we analyze the contracting out of public service provision, comparing the performance of for-profit and not-for-profit private firms. Two institutional arrangements are considered, control rights lying either with the firm as under the UK’s Private Finance...

As with most water companies in the world UK water companies face very little competition for the delivery of water within their area. However, recently both the government and the regulator, Ofwat, have indicated that they wish to see a major change in the industry through a significant growth...