The need to balance austerity with growth policies has put government efficiency high on the economic policy agenda in Europe. Administrative reforms which boost the efficiency of the administration can alleviate the trade-off between consolidation and public service provision. Against such...

Performance budgeting schemes in the public sector have to operate with imperfect performance measures. We argue that these imperfections lead to wasteful fund-seeking (window dressing and lobbying) by the administrative units that produce public services. We develop a game-theoretical model to...

This paper develops the hypothesis that the inclusion of multiple objectives into laws widens the discretionary powers of executive institutions. As the decision how to balance trade-offs is removed from the political to the executive sphere, policy making becomes less transparent and also less...

The application and design of public-private partnerships between the extremes of purely public or purely private task fulfilment in public services is, in practice, subject to political processes. Decisions about PPPs (realisation, arrangement) are taken in the political arena and are therefore...

I consider a society with heterogeneous individuals who can form organizations for the production of a differentiated service. An arrangement of organizations is said to be split up stable when there is no majority to split any of the organizations. Unlike other equilibrium concepts in the...

In this paper we use a simple bureaucracy model of fiscal illusion to analyze the impact of intergovernmental grants on the cost effciency of local jurisdictions. We find that a higher degree of redistribution within a system of fiscal equalization or an increase in the amount of grants received...

Can enrolment incentives reduce the incidence of cream-skimming in the delivery of public sector services (e.g. education, health, job training)? In the context of a large government job training program, we investigate whether the use of enrolment incentives that set different 'shadow prices'...

Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion and that the number of administrators in an office is bound to increase over time. An unique laboratory to test Parkinson's ideas are vehicle registration offices in Germany. Using their data we found...

Due to the public good character of protective measures against natural disasters events, their allocation is very often in the realm of bureaucratic and expert agencies. Based on the economic theory of bureaucracy the behavior of a bureau providing the good "protection against natural hazards"...