Monitoring and Productive Efficiency in Public and Private Firms

Anke Kessler and Christoph Lülfesmann

FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, 2002, vol. 58, issue 2, 167-187

Abstract: The paper compares productive efficiency in public and private firms. We study a principal-agent model in which the firm's manager is privately informed about a cost parameter and exerts unobservable cost reducing effort, while the owner can conduct costly audits to obtain information about the firm's cost. Without auditing, managerial effort (and therefore production efficiency) is strictly higher under public governance with a benevolent government. However, if auditing is possible, a profit-maximizing private owner always audits at least as frequently as a public principal. For small auditing costs, we find that monitoring decisions, managerial effort and welfare under both governance structures coincide. Conversely, when audits becomes more expensive, the public (but not the private) owner refrains from monitoring, and the private firm may produce more cost efficiently.

JEL-codes: D23 L23 L33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/monitoring- ... 16280015221022905713
Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mhr:finarc:urn:sici:0015-2218(200202)58:2_167:mapeip_2.0.tx_2-r

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG, P.O.Box 2040, 72010 Tübingen, Germany

Access Statistics for this article

FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis is currently edited by Alfons Weichenrieder, Ronnie Schöb and Jean-François Tremblay

More articles in FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis from Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Wolpert ().