Contrary to communitarian market criticism institutions relying on money and bidding can strengthen faculties of ‘self-governance’. Securing procedurally egalitarian bidding on the basis of declared monetary evaluations guarantees that all realized changes of a status quo are in an ‘objective’ (pecuniary) sense equally advantageous for all members of the community. We show how to use this idea ...

Conventional wisdom suggests that CEO membership of the compensation committee is an open invitation to rent extraction by self-serving executives. However, using data from New Zealand – where CEO compensation committee membership is relatively common – we find that annual pay increments for CEOs with this apparent advantage averaged six percentage points less than those enjoyed by other CEOs d...

This paper studies how privatising service provision (shifting control rights and contractual obligations to providers) a ects accountability. There are two main e ects. (1) Privatisation demotivates governments from investigating and responding to public demands, since providers then hold up service adaptations. (2) Privatisation demotivates the public from mobilising to pressure for service a...

We model core demands for better governance (political, economic and institutional), more employment and less consumer price inflation using a methodological innovation on the complete elimination of cross-country differences in signals susceptible of sparking social revolts. The empirical evidence based on 14 MENA countries show that the Arab Spring was predictable in 2007 to occur between Jan...

The Eubank (2012, JDS) findings on taxation, political accountability and foreign aid has had an important influence in academic and policy-making debates. Eubank has warned that his findings should not be generalized across Africa until they are backed by robust empirical evidence. This paper puts some empirical structure to the celebrated literature. The empirical evidence which is based on d...

Although the 1940 Act restricts interfund lending within a mutual fund family, families can apply for regulatory exemptions to participate in interfund lending. We find that heterogeneity in portfolio liquidity and investor flows across funds, funds’ investment restrictions, and governance mechanisms influence the fund family’s decision to apply for interfund lending. We document several costs ...

This paper investigates how and to what extent institutional development influences and permits firm-specific information to be incorporated into share prices, as measured by stock price synchronicity. Tracing the experience of China, an economy undergoing dramatic changes in the last 20 years with rich variation in experiences across provinces, this paper reveals that stock price synchronicity...

Field Editor: G. Cassar Wedocument the role of entrepreneurial founder and venture capital (VC) partner co-ethnicity in shaping investment relationships. Co-ethnicity increases the likelihood that a VC firm invests in a company. Conditional on investment, co-ethnicity strengthens the degree of involvement by raising the likelihood of VC board of director involvement and increasing the size and ...

The market power of the incumbents means that average pool prices are set by the costs of entry. Reforms which raise entry costs will be proposed and should be resisted. Reforms to capacity payments may have little effect on prices, but could affect system security. The values of VOLL and LOLP appear grossly incorrect, and if changed might affect reserve margins and the allocation of investment...