Optimal Government Transparency

Government Information Transparency∗

This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a benevolent government may ex-post be non-informative, in an attempt to countervail the tax distortio...

Government Transparency and Policymaking

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

Optimal Economic Transparency

In this paper, I explore the optimal extent to which the central bank should disseminate information among private agents. Individual firms are assumed to have diverse private information, and the central bank provides public information either implicitly, by setting its policy instrument, or explicitly, by making announcements about its short-run targets. The optimal degree of economic transpa...

Federal government unveils modest transparency initiative.

Transparency and Corruption: Does E-Government Help?

Through its pioneering surveys in recent years, the Transparency International (TI) has tried to gauge the extent of corruption in different countries, identify Government departments where corruption appears to be most rampant, and establish some reasons why it seems to grow. Two major factors that contribute to the growth of corruption are the low probability of discovery, and perceived immun...