Following the COVID-19 outbreak, governments all around the world have implemented public health and economic measures to contain the spread of the virus and to support the economy. Public health measures include domestic lockdown, school closures and bans on mass gatherings among others. Economic measures cover wage support, cash transfers, interest rates cuts, tax cuts and delays, and support to exporters or importers. This paper introduces ‘Response2covid19’, a living dataset of governments’ responses to COVID-19. The dataset codes the various policy interventions with their dates at the country-level for more than 200 countries from January 1 to October 1, 2020 and is updated every month. The production of detailed data on the measures taken by governments can help generate robust evidence to support public health and economic decision making.

To understand the extent to which a policy instrument’s early adoption is crucial in crisis management, we leverage unique worldwide data that record the daily evolution of policy mandate adoptions and COVID‐19 infection and mortality rates. The analysis shows that the mask mandate is consistently associated with lower infection rates in the short term, and its early adoption boosts the long‐term efficacy. By contrast, the other five policy instruments—domestic lockdowns, international travel bans, mass gathering bans, and restaurant and school closures—show weaker efficacy. Governments prepared for a public health crisis with stronger resilience or capacity and those with stronger collectivist cultures were quicker to adopt nationwide mask mandates. From a policy design perspective, policymakers must avoid overreacting with less effective instruments and underreacting with more effective ones during uncertain times, especially when interventions differ in efficacy and cost.

This article uses a cross‐country data set to empirically investigate the relationship between national culture and the quality of government. Culture has a strong impact on the quality of government that remains stable even after controlling for differences in institutions and economic development. This effect remains significant when the continents are considered separately, with the exception of Asia. The results reveal the importance of culture in understanding the quality of government and open new avenues for research in comparative public administration in a globalized world.

As market intermediaries, electricity retailers buy electricity from the wholesale market or self generate for re(sale) on the retail market. Electricity retailers are uncertain about how much electricity their residential customers will use at any time of the day until they actually turn switches on. While demand uncertainty is a common feature of all commodity markets, retailers generally rely on storage to manage demand uncertainty. On electricity markets, retailers are exposed to joint quantity and price risk on an hourly basis given the physical singularity of electricity as a commodity. In the literature on electricity markets, few articles deals on intra-day hedging portfolios to manage joint price and quantity risk whereas electricity markets are hourly markets. The contributions of the article are twofold. First, we define through a VaR and CVaR model optimal portfolios for specific hours (3am, 6am, . . . ,12pm) based on electricity market data from 2001 to 2011 for the French market. We prove that the optimal hedging strategy differs depending on the cluster hour. Secondly, we demonstrate the significantly superior efficiency of intra-day hedging portfolios over daily (therefore weekly and yearly) portfolios. 1clearly show that the losses of an optimal daily portfolio are at least nine times higher than the losses of optimal intra-day portfolios.

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As first noticed by Coase (1946), a standard result in utility regulation is that efficiency requires two-part tariffs with marginal prices set to marginal costs and fixed fees equal to each customer's share of fixed costs. Residential water customers in France face marginal prices for water that average about 8% more than marginal costs. Under price elasticity estimates that are consistent with previous results in the literature, efficiency costs represent around 8 million euros of welfare losses for 2008. Even though the impact is fairly small, current price schedules are an important pre-existing distortion which should be considered when evaluating current taxes aimed at addressing external costs. Moreover, efficiency gains from reformed tariffs could be used to fund water assistance programs focused on financially stressed households.

Analytical frameworks of government service contracting decisions typically focuses on the make-or-buy decision. In concepts, governments can either produce the service itself (make), or outsource production (buy). However, governments make and buy the same public services, a practice that is termed concurrent sourcing. Drawing on transaction cost economics and the resource-based view of the firm, this paper examines empirically local governments' propensities to concurrently source public services. Using a unique dataset on water public services of more than 4,000 French municipalities for four years-1998, 2001, 2004 and 2008we find that low transaction hazards, prior contracting experience and low production capabilities have a positive impact on the level of concurrent sourcing. These findings demonstrate that organizations' characteristics are a significant factor in sourcing decisions and suggest that capabilities and their interactions with transaction hazards deserve heightened attention in the study of public contracting.