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Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School

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03/2021
Measures to Influence Individual Behavior: Four Essays in Economics (2021)
Linek, Maximilian
This dissertation in economics studies the effects of changing individuals’ choice environments on their behavior. The choice environment is the setting within which an individual makes her decision. It is widely acknowledged that even inconspicuous changes to this environment can have strong effects on behavior. This notion has spurred large efforts in the public and private sector to design these environments and steer behavior. The dissertation studies four measures that change choice environments to achieve public and private objectives. The first chapter investigates the effects of community meetings on behavior changes that were desired by the central government in Rwanda. It studies these effects with and without performance incentives for local leaders and sheds light on who controls meetings and how they operate. The second chapter studies expected effects of Basic Income on time use, deploying a large-scale survey experiment. The results show intended reallocations that may contribute to foster social cohesion in society. In addition, the chapter suggests its methodology as a new approach to explore policies that are difficult or costly to test. Finally, the third and fourth chapter study the effects of social information and defaults in online donations. The third chapter shows that the empirical regularity of conditional cooperation fails. The fourth and last chapter explores the complex relationship between different numbers and values of donation amount defaults.
07/2020
Guarding the Guardians of the Regulatory State: Understanding the Role of Judicial Accountability in the Governance of Regulatory Agencies (2020)
Mejía López, Luis Everdy
This doctoral dissertation contributes to the debate on the accountability of the regulatory state by studying the role of judicial controls in the governance of regulatory agencies. The investigation consists of three individual research projects motivated by an overarching research question, which enquires how does judicial review of administrative decisions shapes the democratic accountability of the regulatory state. The research conducted here bridges frameworks and research methods from political science and administrative law to better understand how different governments have addressed the need for judicial controls to supervise regulatory agencies. The empirical evidence used for this research consists of unique information compiled by the author in three original and comprehensive datasets, which allowed to conduct diverse research methods for the examination of the evidence. The theoretical frameworks adapted for this study are designed to contribute with empirical knowledge about the varieties of judicial accountability adopted globally to supervise regulation authorities of two of the most representative industries operating under the ‘independent agency’ oversight governance paradigm: the energy and telecommunications public utilities, which are also supervised by competition regulators. The analysis starts with a global perspective of judicial accountability provisions implemented around the globe to supervise regulatory agencies. I conducted a comparative assessment of the intensity of judicial review that courts of appeal can exercise to supervise the legality of regulatory decisions of 100 authorities. The second investigation performs a closer examination of judicial supervision over regulatory agencies from two countries representative of opposite legal traditions: Spain and the United Kingdom. Finally, a third study enquires about the causes that prevent young regulatory agencies to comply with lawful administrative procedures throughout the enforcement of regulation. This last investigation studies the case of the Mexican Agency for Safety, Energy and Environment (ASEA). The overall outcomes of this study advance our understanding of the challenges to improve democratic mechanisms to hold regulatory agencies accountable, which is not only fundamental for a successful performance of regulatory institutions, but also a necessary condition to legitimize the activity of the state, enhance the trust on our governments and the consolidation of democratic values.
06/2020
Digitizing Collective Action: How Digital Technologies Support Civil Society’s Struggle against Corruption (2020)
Niklas, Kossow
This dissertation looks at the use of digital technologies in anti-corruption. It thereby responds to the increasing prominence of the fight against corruption as a research topic, and issue to address for activists and politicians around the world, as well as the ever-growing impact of digitalisation on governance. It answers the research question in what way and how effectively information and communication technology contribute to the control of corruption. In its first part, this dissertation provides an overview of the past twenty years of academic publications on the use and the effectiveness of digital technologies in anti-corruption. I structure the available literature according to its level of analysis, looking at theoretical and large-n studies compared to case specific and qualitative work. I also structure it according to the mechanism that is linking different technologies to a better control of corruption, namely e-government access, upward transparency, downward transparency and mobilisation. In doing so, it highlights gaps in the literature and open questions to research. Subsequently, I am zooming in on the role of civil society in its use of digital technologies, arguing that digital technologies are a tool that can support the role of civil society in controlling corruption. This argument builds on anti-corruption theories and thus lays the groundwork for testing it in two different settings. First, I provide evidence from a global, quantitative dataset, using marginal effects analysis to provide evidence for a positive correlation of civil society capacity, access to information and communication technology and better control of corruption. Second, I analyse a case study, looking at the use of e-procurement in Ukraine since 2014. I am testing if different civil society capacities in Ukrainian regions had an impact on corruption risks measured in Ukrainian tenders. While the quantitative data analysis gives clear, positive results concerning the relationship described above, the case study on Ukraine does not offer conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of civil society capacity and ICT access in the fight against corruption. The dissertation concludes by calling for future research into this relationship, especially by using data on public procurement.
01/2021
The Aftermath of the Laval Quartet: Emancipating labour (law) from the rationality of the internal market in the field of posting (2021)
Bogoeski, Vladimir
The Laval Quartet rulings of the CJEU have become an indispensable reference in every discussion on the social dimension of the European integration process over the past decade. Becoming a synonym for the subordination of labour rights and social goals to market freedoms, the rulings have raised different questions, the most pressing one being about the relationship between the economic and the social sphere of the EU as an emerging polity. The dissertation enquires into the question to what extent that relationship has been reconfigured in the aftermath of the Quartet rulings. Starting with the rulings themselves through a law in context approach, the dissertation studied a segment of the aftermath in the period following the rulings (2008-2019). While the aftermath has played out at various levels of EU’s multi-level governance structure, this study focuses on the supranational macro-level, examining the development of the subsequent CJEU case law and the EU-level political responses. The thesis makes the argument that due to the countermovement that the rulings have quickly triggered at EU and Member State level, a political struggle over the social in the EU has emerged, demonstrating the difficulty of conceiving of the EU as a common social space in conditions of diversity, a strong core-periphery division and governance structures dominated by market rationality. Particularly the developments in the field of posting of workers, starting with the Quartet and ending with the Revised Posted Workers Directive, reveal three important insights for the integration process more broadly. First, the existing material inequality and differences in economic development among Member States in enlarged EU, of which the Quartet was an early symptom, have buttressed the European regulatory space as a space of conflict between the core and the peripheries. Second, resolving core-periphery conflicts has distributional consequences, which are particularly visible in the context of labour and social questions. Resolving such conflicts requires an EU common conception of (social) justice, which appears particularly difficult to conceive of in the core-periphery constellation. Third, progressive social solutions mostly remain foreclosed, as in both cases, at the Court as well as in the political realm, these are mostly contested within a framework dominated by market rationality.
03/2020
Confronting Vulnerability - State-Induced Social Innovation and the Making of South Korea's Social Enterprises (2020)
Claassen, Casper Hendrik
This dissertation delineates the state-induced emergence and mainstreaming of South Korea’s (hereinafter, ‘Korea’) social enterprise sector following the enactment of a social enterprise promotion act in 2007. In particular, this dissertation contextualizes the public sector-led popularization and mobilization of social enterprises and studies the outcomes of this intervention. This dissertation includes analyses of networks, discourse, and geographic agglomerations, and it highlights the pressures, mechanisms, institutions, and organizations that have been integral to this process of state-induced innovation. It contributes to the literature on interactions between the state and social economy organizations, such as social enterprises. The relationship between the state and social economy organizations has been subject to much academic scrutiny, and the Korean case contributes to this literature by illustrating how the state has induced the emergence and scaling of social enterprises as a private organizational form and also by showing where social enterprises have flourished. The Korean case contrasts with the North American and European cases in that in Korea the state purposively popularized social enterprise, as opposed to the North American and European traditions where the origins of social enterprise are more closely linked to civil society. This has implications for how states can induce the founding of private organizational forms that serve their interests. Korea is an especially intriguing case study given that ‘social enterprise’ as an organizational form was almost entirely absent from Korean society prior to 2007, yet has now become embedded into society in the sense that social enterprises are found in nearly every industry and municipal district. There are now thousands of social enterprises in Korea a little more than a decade after the enactment of social enterprise promotion legislation. Civil society has, evidently, accepted social enterprises as a valid organizational form. This dissertation seeks to establish an empirical platform and a theoretical framework which can be utilized for a more theoretical analysis of social enterprise and other social economy organizations in Korea in future studies. Nevertheless, this dissertation does reveal how actors can manipulate the path dependencies imposed by history, and the capabilities bequeathed by it, to forge new possibilities in novel and strategic ways. The Korean state’s ability to induce social innovation is a tangible illustration of such.
02/2020
Fiscal Consolidation Following a Sovereign Default. The Burden of Monetary Union Membership and the Role of the International Monetary Fund (2020)
Cordes, Anne Christine
The global financial crisis has reignited the debate about the costs of sovereign default and the drawbacks of monetary union membership. Historically, several members of monetary unions defaulted on their debt and thereafter had to consolidate their finances. However, following a default, do members of a monetary union actually have to rely on fiscal consolidation to a greater extent than do other countries? This dissertation provides the first comprehensive comparison of sovereign defaults in a monetary union. In the period from 1990 to 2010, four monetary union members defaulted on their debt: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Gabon, and Grenada. Their fiscal policy responses following these defaults are compared with those of four similar small middle income countries: Jamaica, Seychelles, Belize, and Suriname. This dissertation analyses the size, type, and timing of fiscal consolidation based on several hundred primary sources, from appropriation acts to budget plans and government speeches. The comparison shows that all countries had to consolidate following a default – irrespective of their membership of a monetary union. The four countries with an independent monetary policy tried to ease the burden of adjustment by devaluing their currencies, lowering refinancing rates, putting pressure on domestic banks, or resorting to direct central bank financing. However, in turn, foreign currency debt increased due to the resulting depreciation of the exchange rate. That is, countries outside of a monetary union have also had to consolidate. However, monetary union members still faced a greater burden of adjustment as they had to cut nominal expenditure to achieve the necessary internal devaluation inside the monetary union and could not let inflation do the work. This dissertation also highlights the central role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in explaining the type and timing of fiscal consolidation following a sovereign default. Six of the eight countries turned to the IMF at some point. Once they had signed up to an IMF programme, they consolidated more, especially on the expenditure side. Despite these differences in the type and timing of fiscal consolidation due to monetary union membership and the involvement of the IMF, none of the eight countries could avoid consolidating its finances following the sovereign default.
04/2020
Moving beyond public service motivation. Exploring the link between work motivations and employee attitudes in public sector organisations (2020)
Bossdorf, Jessica Breaugh
This dissertation examines employee work motivations, attitudes, and outcomes within the public sector drawing upon quantitative cross-country survey data. It challenges the dominant idea that public service motivation (PSM) is the only form of work motivation that matters for public servants by examining PSM against traditional intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation based on the framework of self-determination theory (SDT). It links these motivation types to different employee outcomes such as job satisfaction, ethics, and employee engagement while also taking into consideration stress in the workplace. It then shifts focus to examine interpersonal relationships at the organisational level through the concept of organizational social capital (OSC) and how management instruments support or impede OSC. This is relevant as it introduces conceptual and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT, which is limited, or conflated, in PSM research. Additionally, understanding how management tools are linked to social capital provides a new angle for assessing management interventions and how they support or hinder the values, trust, and support within organisations. This research analyses civil service perceptions and attitudes across Europe and is presented in the form of four distinct papers. Overall findings show that PSM and SDT work motivation are different based on temporal focus, motivation needs, and measurement strategies and their individual utility differs depending on what type of attitude and outcome is measured. SDT appears to be more strongly related to job-related outcomes, while PSM is more strongly related to attitudes associated with job purpose. However, more nuanced findings suggest that different motivations may compensate for the failings of another and that they behave differently in different contexts and different stressors. Results also show that management tools focusing on interpersonal interactions are associated with positive social capital and can deter the impact of political interference. This dissertation contributes to the theoretical and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT work motivation, providing evidence to support the fact that motivation types are context-specific and different motivations matter in evoking specific attitudes and behaviours. Consequently, future research should identify which motivations are most appropriate for which line of study and management actions should take this into consideration when designing institutional policies and interventions.
05/2020
Country Size and State Performance: How Size Affects Politics, Administration and Governance (2020)
Jugl, Marlene
This dissertation addresses the question how the size of a country affects the performance of ist political and administrative system. It advances the literature on small states by explicitly theorizing large states and empirically comparing countries of different sizes. Country size, operationalized as population size, is expected to be related to three clusters of country characteristics: First, a perception of vulnerability in small states vs. a lack of awareness for external threats in large states; second, social homogeneity and proximity in small states vs. heterogeneity and distance in large states; third, institutional centralization and concentration of power in small states vs. specialization and de-centralization in large states. The effect of country size and these three characteristic features on different aspects of procedural state performance is analyzed in three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 develops the argument that small country size favors the stability of political regimes, namely authoritarian monarchies. It iterates between theoretical reflections and the empirical analysis of different data: statistical data on population size and monarchic regime durability between 1946 and 2008; two most similar comparative cases of monarchic regimes, Egypt and Jordan; and supposedly deviant cases. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of population size on the effectiveness of national bureaucracies and expects a trade-off between economies and diseconomies of scale. It estimates multivariate OLS regression models and within-between random effects models for more than 150 countries. The analysis supports the hypothesized inverse U-shaped relation and finds that administrative effectiveness is highest, ceteris paribus, at medium levels of population size. Chapter 4 consists of a comparative case study of Germany and Luxembourg and investigates whether country size affected how the two states prepared for and reacted to the 2015 migration crisis. The analysis builds on newspaper articles and 20 expert interviews. It shows that Luxembourg’s small size favored identities and structures that allowed early crisis recognition and preparation as well as swift communication and coordination, whereas Germany’s large size led to attention biases that inhibited a quick reaction. In sum, the findings show that country size affects several aspects of state performance, which has important normative and practical implications.
07/2019
EU Police Cooperation (1976 - 2016). State Preferences in the Context of Differentiated Integration (2019)
König, Franca
European internal security has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Various incidents across EU Member States have demonstrated the transnationalisation of terrorism and organised crime as well as the need to work together to safeguard security in a progressively borderless Europe. Governments and citizens have consistently called for a growing role of the EU and coordinating at this level. In this light, it appears striking that different cooperation initiatives continue to mushroom inside and outside the EU framework. Their parallel emergence duplicates efforts at best but can also obstruct information exchange and produce security failures. This dissertation sets out to investigate why Member States acknowledge the benefits of integration, yet advance differentiation as well. Concretely, it studies the formation of state preferences in the still largely intergovernmental field of EU police cooperation. It asks which factors shape government positions and how they drive Member States to favour integration. In particular, the influence of cross-country interdependencies, politicisation and policy entrepreneurship might help explain processes of integration and differentiation in this policy area. Their relative importance as drivers of state preferences is studied across the institutional development of EU police cooperation between 1976 and 2016. The analysis is organised around four ‘milestones’ in the integration of this field: 1) the 1976 intergovernmental Trevi Group; 2) the 1995 Europol Convention establishing the European Police Office (Europol); (3) the 2009 Europol Council Decision establishing Europol as official EU agency; and (4) the 2016 Europol Regulation. This dissertation finds that interdependencies in the fight against common threats mattered most as driver of state integration preferences in the early stages of European police cooperation. More recently, supranational policy entrepreneurship has emerged as key influence of pro-integration attitudes among Member States and can be expected to grow in importance. Politicisation, against it, provides windows of opportunity to this end and acts rather as amplifier of integration pressure from interdependencies and policy entrepreneurs. In sum, the asymmetrical effects of all three drivers explains the formation of diverging governmental attitudes towards integration and can thus help account for the persistence of parallel processes of differentiation and integration.
06/2019
Essays in Behavioral Public Economics (2019)
Pardo, Nicolas
This dissertation uses detailed micro data to shed light on issues affecting decision making in the administration of public resources. By helping to understand these dynamics, it informs the design of more effective policies, which ultimately translates into an increase in social welfare. In particular, it studies the role of cognitive limitations and social dynamics on the collection and use of public resources. The analysis of this question is carried out in three separate chapters, using administrative data at the sub-national level in a variety of settings. The first chapter analyzes the presence of interactions between economic agents on the expenditure side of public finances. Specially, it studies the presence of fiscal interactions on the expenditure decisions of local governments in Colombia. The next two chapters focus on the revenue side of public finances, and analyze the role of social norms and cognitive limitations on individual compliance in two different settings. The second chapter studies the role of intergenerational transmission of social norms on property tax compliance in Argentina. Finally, the third chapter investigates the effect of salience and information simplification on timely compliance for the payment of speeding tickets in the Czech Republic.
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