Accountability and decentralisation in government: An incomplete contracts model

Probing system limits: Decentralisation and local political accountability in Vietnam

Decentralization occupies an important space in debates over public-sector reform in doi moi Vietnam. This paper assesses the changing distribution of roles, responsibilities and resources across levels of government over the past decade. Vietnam is incrementally transfering greater administrative and fiscal responsibilities to the provincial level. In addition, the Communist Party is attemptin...

Decentralisation and Accountability in Infrastructure Delivery in Developing Countries*

Many developing countries are experimenting with decentralisation of public service delivery to elected local governments instead of bureaucrats appointed by a central government. We study the resulting implications in a theoretical model in which the central government is uninformed about local need and unable to monitor service allocations. Bureaucrats charge bribes for services as monopoly p...

Decentralisation and Local Government Topic Guide

Cognition and Incomplete Contracts

Thinking about contingencies, designing covenants and seeing through their implications is costly. Parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete. The paper develops a model of limited cognition and examines its consequences for contractual design. JEL numbers: D23, D82, D86, L22.

Incomplete Contracts and Control

The work on incomplete contracts cited by the prize committee began in the summer of 1983, but it may be useful to say a bit about how I reached that point. As a graduate student, first at the University of Warwick and then at Princeton University, with a degree in mathematics behind me, I was drawn to general equilibrium theory, and my PhD thesis was on general equilibrium theory with incomple...