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AbstractCitizen Service Centers are government offices where different authorities are co‐located and where several public services are offered in the same physical location. The goal of implementing such One Stop Shops for public services is to solve problems with a malfunctioning government bureaucracy for frontline service delivery. In spite of reforms in at least 70 countries, however, there are few evaluations. This paper evaluates the impact of Poupatempo ("Savetime"), a Brazilian Citizen Service Center reform that has inspired similar programs in other countries. We collect data on one of the most common errands at the Brazilian bureaucracy, driver's license renewal, and evaluate the impact of Poupatempo on the time, number of trips, and payments needed to undertake the renewal, and on other variables representing transaction costs, red tape, and transparency in the citizen‐state interaction. Our difference‐in‐differences estimates indicate large reductions in the time expended by citizens and in proxies for transaction costs, but are less encouraging for the social quality of the licensing procedure, which we also evaluate. We discuss whether incentives to speed up processes prevailed where other steering instruments would have been more appropriate, and explore remedies. We also discuss limitations to establishing a true One Stop Shop.

Intermediaries helping individuals and firms with the government bureaucracy are common in developing countries. Although such bureaucracy intermediaries are, anecdotally, linked with corruption and welfare losses, few formal analyses exist. In our model, a government license can benefit individuals. We study individuals' net gain when acquiring the license through the regular bureaucratic procedure, through bribing or through intermediaries. For a given procedure, individuals using intermediaries are better off than if intermediaries and corruption had not existed. Intermediaries "grease the wheels". We then study incentives of corrupt bureaucrats to create red tape. When free to choose levels of red tape, bureaucrats implement more red tape and individuals are unambiguously worse off in a setting with intermediaries than with "direct" corruption only. Intermediaries can thus improve access to the bureaucracy, but also strengthen incentives to create red tape - a potential explanation why license procedures tend to be long in developing countries.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. Essay 1, "Dispatchers", is a study of a specialized service sector that has arisen in many developing countries. It is a well-established fact that the government bureaucracy in many developing countries is large, difficult to understand, non-transparent and time-consuming. However, "de jure" procedures sometimes have little to do with how firms or individuals actually go about when dealing with the government bureaucracy. One institution that has emerged is a specialized intermediary, henceforth called dispatcher, that assists individuals and firms in their contacts with the public sector. A model is developed to study the effects of dispatchers on time and resources spent in obtaining licenses, on informality and on the incentives of bureaucrats and dispatchers to make regulation more/less complicated. Essay 2, "Informal firms, investment incentives and formalization", studies informal firms in developing countries. In a typical developing country, the majority of small firms are informal and entry costs into formality are high. What can we expect in terms of firm investment, growth and formalization in such a setting? I show that investment and growth trajectories differ substantially between firms that choose to formalize and those that do not. The formalization decision depends non-trivially on the informal firm's productivity. This, in turn, has an effect on how policies should be designed. The long-run firm size distribution exhibits a "missing middle" and depends on the initial firm-level stock of capital, a result that can be interpreted as a poverty trap. Essay 3, "Compositional and dynamic Laffer effects in a model with constant returns to scale", studies dynamic effects of tax cuts. The possibility of tax cuts paying for themselves over time seems like an attractive option for policy makers. In a constant returns to scale model, I study conditions under which reductions in capital taxes are self-financing

It is a well-established fact that the government bureaucracy in many developing countries is large, difficult to understand, non-transparent and time-consuming. However, "de jure" bureaucratic procedures sometimes have little to do with how firms or individuals actually go about when dealing with the government bureaucracy. One institution that has emerged in many countries is a specialized intermediary, henceforth called dispatcher, that assists individuals and firms in their contracts with the public sector. It is often the workings of this "de facto" institution, rather than the de jure procedure, that determines outcomes. A model where firms demand a license from the government bureaucracy is developed in order to address two sets of questions related to the use of dispatchers. First, what is the impact of dispatchers on time and resources that firms spend in obtaining licenses and what is the impact on the degree of informality, i.e. on the fraction of firms that choose to not get the license? How do these results depend on the organization of bureaucrats and dispatchers, the regulatory framework and the extent of corruption in the bureaucracy? Second, what are the incentives of corrupt bureaucrats and dispatchers to try to make regulation more/less complicated? When are the incentives of bureaucrats and dispatchers to create "red tape" aligned? Ultimately and ideally, the answers to these questions can help explain why reforms of the public sector have been so difficult.

Through a study of ten commercially published prison autobiographies, Haunting Prison: Exploring the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institutionunveils how prison is narrativized and socially represented as an abject and uncanny institution, shedding new light on what prison is and does in Western carceral imaginations.

1 A Brief Genealogy of the Concept of Attention in Phenomenology -- 2 The Alien World: Attention and the Habitual -- 3 Attention Within the Body: Orientation Lost and Found -- 4 Shared Attention as Communion -- 5 Animal Attention with Cézanne -- 6 Benevolent Attention: Blinded by Judgment.

The literature on trade liberalization and environment has not considered federal structures. This paper shows how the design of environmental policy in a federal system has implications for the effects of trade reform. Trade liberalization leads to a decline in pollution taxes regardless of whether pollution taxes are set at the federal (centralized) or local (decentralized) level, and it increases social welfare. The effect under a decentralized system is smaller than if these taxes are set by the federal government, and pollution emissions therefore decline in this case. Moreover, majority bias interacts with trade liberalization if federal taxes are used.