The art of alignment transaction cost economics and the provision of public services at the local level

This book is situated against the background of the debate on recent institutional changes in\ud the public sector. These changes concern the privatization, liberalization and autonomization\ud of different kinds of public services. The main incentives for introducing such new modes\ud of governance were, and still are, expectations of efficiency improvements. Whether or not\ud these, in fact, were realized is questioned, however.\ud Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) has been put forward as an approach to address this\ud issue. Our study focuses on the question whether and in which form TCE, which was originally\ud developed by Oliver Williamson to analyse commercial transactions, can be applied\ud to institutional changes at the local government level in the Netherlands. More specifically,\ud this study addresses the question what the discriminating alignment hypothesis - stating that\ud transactions, which differ in their attributes, are aligned with governance structures, to effect\ud a transaction cost economizing result - can contribute to comparative assessments of the\ud efficiency and performance of governance structures at the local level.\ud To that end, this book studies the local public service of collecting household waste. Here,\ud a number of institutional changes have resulted in a variety of modes of governance, i.e. contracting\ud out to private companies, public companies, and municipal services. A comparative\ud case study of eight municipalities with a high urbanization degree shows that with regard\ud to this particular public service, alignment between governance structures and transactions\ud matters. The misaligned mode ‘public company’ has the highest relative level of transaction\ud costs, while the aligned modes ‘municipal service’ and ‘contracting out’ have a lower relative\ud level of transaction costs. These findings are consistent with the theory

Identification, estimating and testing in the restricted linear model

Estimation;Testing;62J05;62K99;statistics

Iterated WLS using residuals for improved efficiency in the linear model with completely unknown heteroskedasticity

Estimation;mathematische statistiek

Linear time-invariant filters of infinite order for non-stationary processes

Statistical Methods;mathematische statistiek

A weak law of large numbers for m-dependent random variables with unbounded M

Statistical Methods;mathematische statistiek

Density of the least squares estimator in the multivariate linear model with arbitrarily normal variables

Estimation;Multivariate Analysis;statistics

Estimation in linear regression under the presence of heteroskedasticity of a completely unknown form

Estimation;mathematische statistiek

Density of the f-statistic in the linear model with arbitrarily normal distributed errors

Estimation;mathematische statistiek

Canonical Partitions in the Restricted Linear Model

In the linear model y = X + " under the restriction C = 0 a canonical partition C = [C0;C1] of the rows of C admits a simple representation of linear subspaces of values = X . Its use is shown for the identification, estimating and testing of linear combinations DB. Results are derived without imposing any rank conditions on X;C and D. Applications are in the field of experimental design with unbalanced data.