Search results

What determines the allocation of tasks among government agencies? This article develops a formal model of task allocation that argues that jurisdictions are strategically designed to achieve legislative goals. In the model, agencies choose unobservable policies, & political outcomes are a noisy indicator of these choices. The legislature therefore faces a compliance issue when the agencies' policy preferences are different from its own. The legislature exerts control by defining agency jurisdictions setting ex ante budgets & choosing ex post contractual inducements. The principal result is that tasks will be consolidated under a single roof when that agency prefers lower levels of policy than the legislature. In other cases, separating tasks prevents resources from being allocated in a manner undesirable for the legislature. 4 Figures, 1 Appendix, 29 References. Adapted from the source document.

A dilemma of the "Power of the Purse" is that cutting an agency's budget may make a desired policy infeasible. I examine the implications of this dilemma with a repeated game in which a bureau chooses unobservable policies after a legislature sets its budget. The bureau is work-averse & has its own policy preferences & therefore may cheat, but the legislature may perform an audit to recover "slack" funds. A main result is that if the legislature desires a higher policy level than the agency, it faces a trade-off between "good" but wasteful policies & "bad" but efficient ones. 3 Figures, 1 Appendix, 13 References. Adapted from the source document.

Discusses the transition from performance appraisal to performance management, including the need to incorporate organizational values in competency-based PMS in policing.

How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next election. This claim is tested using the changes in Japanese central-to-municipality transfers after a representative passes away while in office. The study finds that electorally 'strong' constituency groups do not lose transfers when they lose their representatives. However when 'weak' constituency groups lose their representatives, the transfers decrease.

How do a regulator's decisions depend on the characteristics and strategies of its external clients? We develop a theory of approval regulation in which an uninformed regulator may veto the submission of a better‐informed firm. The firm can perform publicly observable experiments to generate product information prior to submission. We find that when experimentation is short, Type I errors (approving bad products) are more likely for products submitted by firms with lower experimentation costs (larger firms), while Type II errors (rejecting good products) should be concentrated among smaller firms. These comparative statics are reversed when experimentation is long. We perform a statistical analysis on FDA approvals of new pharmaceutical products using two different measures of Type I error. We find consistent support for the counterintuitive hypothesis that, under particular conditions, errors are decreasing in the size of the firm submitting the product.