Contracting for Government Services: Theory and Evidence from U.S. Cities

Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset of地方政府可通过自有雇员，或与私营、公共部门的服务提供商签订合同的方式提供公共服务。我们针对这一"自制或外购（make-or-buy）"决策构建了相关模型，该模型着重凸显了生产效率与合同管理成本之间的权衡关系。我们构建了一组数据集