Property rights and transaction costs: The role of ownership and organization in German public service provision

Maria Friese, Ulrich Heimeshoff and Gordon Klein

No 173, Arbeitspapiere from University of Münster, Institute for Cooperatives

Abstract: This paper provides evidence that ownership and organization matters for the efficiency of provision of public services. In particular, we find that pure private ownership is more efficient than pure public ownership, followed by mixed ownership. The delegation of management in different legal forms also has an impact, highlighting the importance of the design of the government-operator relation. We apply a structural approach of production function estimation ensuring precise determination of total factor productivity for a panel of German refuse collection firms in the time period between 2000-2012. We project total factor productivity estimates (TFP) on ownership and organization. Our results are in line with the trade-offs implied by the property rights literature and provide important policy implications regarding the organization of public service provision.

Keywords: incentive regulation; productive efficiency; refuse collection; public utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L00 L33 L50 L97 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff, nep-eur and nep-ino
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https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/148933/1/875240070.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Property rights and transaction costs – The role of ownership and organization in German public service provision (2020)
Working Paper: Property rights and transaction costs: The role of ownership and organization in German public service provision (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:wwuifg:173

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