a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: H11 G32 D23 L20 Keywords: Public–private partnerships Incomplete contracts Soft budget constraints Governments have begun to embrace public–private partnerships (P3s) as vehicles for providing public services. This paper considers the controversial question of when private financing of public projects is optimal. Private development can dominate public ...

At least nine different criteria are relevant for decisions about public spending for health care. These include economic efficiency criteria (public goods, externalities, catastrophic cost, and cost-effectiveness), ethical reasons (poverty, horizontal and vertical equity, and the rule of rescue), and political considerations (especially demands by the populace). Sometimes one criterion should ...

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) started making the headlines in the midst of the global financial crisis. They were welcomed neither by academics nor by politicians of Western countries. In a flurry of 2008 papers SWF were peremptorily told what they should and shouldn’t do. The reasoning underlying the prescriptive norms was flawed in two respects. First it simply equated SWFs to other instituti...

Considerable prior analysis has gone into the study of zoning restrictions on locational choice and on fiscal burdens, but none addresses the level and distribution of public goods provided under fiscal zoning. Our analysis emphasizes the interplay between land use restrictions and public good provision, focusing on schooling outcomes. We extend existing general equilibrium models of location a...

Events in the building industry in Nigeria in the last decade show the important role the private sector played in housingfinance. With the advent of the public-private partnership concept in almost every sector of the socio-economic spheresof the nation, the role of the private sector in housing finance cannot be over-emphasized. This paper clearly states thatthe low-income public servants do ...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of finance-oriented vs. operations-oriented management control in public hospitals on physicians’ role conflict and cost consciousness as well as on perceived organizational performance. First, we conduct a participatory research project, and identify two public university hospitals with clearly differing management control environments: on...

Since the Coleman Report, many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of K–12 education spending in the United States. To study the effect of these school finance reform–induced changes in public school spending on long-run adult outcom...