The U.S. higher education market grew substantially between 2005 and 2015, with an increase in the number of programs offered of 13% and an increase in annual graduations of nearly 30%. Can government policy significantly impact student and college decisions? Does this market respond to occupation-specific growth? Are for-profit colleges more responsive to changes in demand? I shed light on these questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I estimate the impact of federal oversight on enrollment and completions at for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges experienced a 33% enrollment decline between 2010 and 2015 following an increase in federal oversight. Did oversight cause this decline? I assess the causal effect of two policies on for-profit enrollment: a significant report on misleading for-profit recruiting, and threatened federal student aid sanctions on under-performing colleges. I use a difference-in-difference framework that exploits the differential exposure of a treatment group to each policy. For the report, treatment is based on the presence of a local alternative; for sanctions, it is based on a debt-to-income threshold. Both policies significantly contributed to the enrollment decline: The report caused a 45% enrollment decline over 5 years at for-profit colleges with a nearby alternative, while the threat of sanctions led to a 121% greater enrollment decline at for-profit colleges below the performance threshold. In Chapter 2, I estimate the causal response of graduations and programs offered to new licensing requirements. Using a difference-in-difference framework, I exploit state-level variation in new licensing statutes. I find that new licenses cause increases in both the number of graduations and programs offered in fields related to the licensed occupations. I further show that new licenses cause employment increases in college-level occupations and employment declines in low-education occupations. In Chapter 3, I estimate program entry and exit due to labor demand shocks across college sectors. I find that the number of public and private non-profit Bachelor's degree programs offered increases following an employment increase in related occupations. However, I find no evidence of a similar response in the for-profit sector.

Although endowed with rich oversight bodies, policies and Acts, the state of financial management in South African government departments is illustrated in a number of clean qualified audits. The media and the Auditor-General’s report are continuously reporting on arbitrary financial practices, corruption, fruitless expenditure, tender rigging and inability to spend allocated funds to mention a few of the problems government experiences in its financial management. Financial management in the public service, if not addressed holistically, may hamper, rather than assist, government departments with the speedy delivery of services. The research study questioned the extent to which the legislative oversight bodies successfully ensure public financial accountability and responsibility. The objective of this study was not to evaluate the performance of institutions or any public financial management offices, but rather to assess the capacity of the public financial management systems themselves to support sound fiscal policy and financial management. The Constitution requires members of the Cabinet to provide Parliament with full and regular reports concerning matters under their control. The Constitution further requires the legislature to provide for effective mechanisms of oversight and to ensure that executive organs of state in government are accountable to the legislatures. There are instances where parliamentary committees’ reports and recommendations were ignored by government departments. Such actions can be a threat to democracy and good governance. Therefore Parliament and the legislature have a critical role to play in overseeing effective performance by all organs of state. Results of the study indicated that the turnover rate of members of parliamentary committees such as Standing Committee on Public Accounts remains a challenge and this impact the effectiveness of these committees. The results also revealed that it is a challenge to retain the directors-general in most government department. High turnover rate of directors general is a challenge as directors-general are accounting officers of Government departments. High turnover rate of directors-general could bring a perception that there is a lack of accountability and could be seen as threat to the democracy. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / gm2014 / School of Public Management and Administration (SPMA) / unrestricted

Bureaucrats are hired to produce public goods. Yet, despite the distributive implications of this canonical rationale, bureaucrats are generally absent from theories of "who gets what." The three papers in this dissertation advance a role for bureaucrats in the distribution of public goods and services premised on their work in policy implementation. I provide new theory and evidence to answer three questions. The first paper asks the question: under what conditions do bureaucrats’ actions generate inequalities in the provision of public services? The second paper inquires: how does the design of bureaucratic oversight institutions influence a state's capacity to implement policy and citizen access to services? The third essay asks: how does the co-production of public goods by politicians and bureaucrats influence voters' ability to hold politicians to account? In the first paper, I study the conditions under which bureaucratic bias (discrimination) in the allocation of services generates inequality in access. I argue that citizens' principal mechanism of control over bureaucrats is to complain to a politician. When politicians respond to complaints by tightening oversight of bureaucrats, differences in citizens' access to complain induce bureaucrats to devote more effort to groups with the loudest voices. I test this theory using a national-scale factorial audit experiment of Colombia's two largest national social welfare programs to measure bureaucratic effort behaviorally. I find that bureaucrats provide less information about social welfare programs to poor citizens and internal migrants. Consistent with the theory, such bias manifests most strongly in places with greater inequalities in citizens' ability to access the state and on tasks where oversight from politicians is most likely. These results are unlikely to reflect taste-based discrimination or screening. This paper shows that inequality in access to public goods and services can emerge even when politicians' budget allocations to public goods are equitable. In the second paper, I examine the distributional consequences of the use of citizen complaints in bureaucratic oversight. I study the adoption and consequences of bureaucratic oversight institutions in the context of service provision. Specifically, I consider a politician's choice to use (or ignore) information generated by complaints when monitoring a bureaucrat. Complaints generate information that direct a politicians' remediation of bureaucratic decisions and may increase bureaucratic effort. However, when costs of complaint vary across the population, the use of this information generates inequality in the distribution of service outputs, improving the access of citizens that can complain while reducing the access of citizens that cannot. Further, relying on citizen information can build or erode a state's capacity to accurately implement public policies, depending on the distribution of these costs across the population. This paper introduces citizen complaint systems as an institution that shapes both policy implementation capacity and distributional outcomes in comparative perspective. In the final paper, I start from the observation that in many theories of electoral accountability, voters learn about an incumbent’s quality through the observation of public goods outcomes. However, politicians rely on bureaucracies to produce public goods. Across contexts, politicians work with bureaucracies of markedly different qualities. In this paper, I argue that accountability relations between voters and politicians yield different empirical implications at different levels of bureaucratic quality. I introduce a model of electoral accountability with a voter, a politician, and a bureaucrat. The model identifies observational equivalencies between (i.) the implications of pooling equilibria that emerge at high and low levels of bureaucratic quality (with informed, rational voters) and (ii.) the findings of existing studies that are interpreted to indicate a lack of accountability due to uninformed or irrational voters. I demonstrate the plausibility of the model by introducing and validating an original measure of bureaucratic quality in Brazilian municipalities. I use this measure to extend four studies on corruption and accountability. I conclude with implications for the comparative study of accountability across the world's democracies.

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State legislatures have variable levels of professionalism. Measures of state legislative professionalism typically include metrics such as the number of legislative staff, legislative session length, and legislator compensation. This research considers the influence of variability in levels of legislative professionalism on the state’s oversight process. Few prior studies engage the legislative oversight process in states. To fill this gap, this research takes a grounded theory approach that uses thirty-three interviews with legislators, legislative staff, committee staff, and legislative research organizations in five states to test existing concepts and to develop new directions for research. The current scholarship on oversight and legislative institutions emphasizes the importance of broad factors like elections and committees, as well as more specific concepts like inter-branch conflict, partisanship, and legislative term-limits. This research confirms and extends those ideas, reaching the conclusion that oversight in states is a deeply political action. A central contribution of this work is a consideration of how the oversight process in states operates on the ground. The interviews uncover that many measures of professionalism often perform in unforeseen ways than what might expected. For instance, a lengthy legislative session can prohibit oversight actors from performing oversight functions. Conversely, long legislative interim periods provide actors with the space to conduct meaningful reviews of administrative action. This research also advances understandings of state legislative research organizations – like the Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission and Texas Sunset Commission – which play a vital role in performing meaningful legislative oversight. To catalyze these ideas a new concept, the oversight entrepreneur, is used to describe how stakeholders use the oversight process to achieve their preferences and enhance their reputations. The interviews contained here also expose the importance of each state’s individual context – including Constitutional, institutional, normed and historical factors. The dissimilarities that play out across states (and their secondary effects) demonstrate that future scholars would be well served to adopt caution in the application of concepts across contexts. / Ph. D. / This dissertation examines the legislative oversight process through first-person interviews with members of state legislatures and their staffs. I am primarily interested in understanding how differences in legislatures influence oversight processes. Specifically, this considers how variation in state legislatures – such as the amount of full time staff or the length of legislative session – change the level of attention and how actors perform oversight. Legislative oversight is typically defined as legislative review of administrative/executive actions – such as committee hearings and personal contact with executive actors. State legislative oversight research is an area of limited prior scholarship. The findings of this research demonstrate that legislative oversight is a low priority of legislative actors. Consequently, the rationale for and practice of legislative oversight is largely based on the context within the specific state. Individual legislators often take action in the realm of oversight solely for their own motivations or because of their distinctive expertise, a phenomenon that I term oversight entrepreneurs. Finally, this research demonstrates that future scholars would benefit from more research that explores how differences across state legislatures play out in other aspects of the legislative branch and its operations.

Yes / This study aims to provide a better understanding of oversight the audit profession in Egypt, including its motivations, objectives and its working approach. Further, it reaches a better understanding of the Egyptian Big 4 partners’ perceptions of the new Audit Oversight Board (AOB). Previous studies have frequently examined the audit oversight system in developed countries (US and UK in particular), but little is known on how the system works on developing countries. We believe that facing different problems and challenges demands that audit regulators in developing countries follow different approaches in order to improve the quality of their audit markets. Lack of skilled auditors, lack of transparency and public accountability, and a high level of corruption are the main problems facing the audit profession in Egypt (Awadallah, 2006, Wahdan et. al., 2005: a). Our findings suggest that establishing an audit oversight board in Egypt has been motivated by the need to attract foreign investments and follow the global trend of auditing in developed countries. A number of legal changes are needed in order to improve the AOB’s efficiency.

Yes / This paper reviews the literature on the independent oversight of auditing from 2003 to 2018 and provides several research opportunities for filling the identified gaps in that literature. Our review classifies the literature into three themes: (1) the development of independent audit oversight; (2) the effects of independent audit oversight; and (3) the interface between the independent audit oversight authorities and the global audit networks. The paper finds different effects of the independent audit oversight. Positively, it enhances the capital markets by adding more credibility to the published information. Auditors become more conservative about accepting or continuing to work with high-risk clients. At the same time, while audit fees have increased as a result of the additional requirements of independent audit regulation, non-audit fees from audit clients have decreased significantly. Negatively, independent oversight has increased audit concentration and resulted in insufficient choice of auditors in most audit markets.

<p>In South Africa, municipal councils are accorded a legal status and authority of a deliberative legislative body. This is considered critical for the municipal council to establish appropriate structures, processes and systems for effective oversight, particularly, oversight of budget execution. However, indications are that, the current legal and institutional measures need to be strengthened to enable municipal council to exercise oversight of the budget execution. Literature review conducted in this study highlighted executive dominance, lack of technical capacity, lack of access to relevant information and partisan attitude as key factors constraining elected representatives in general from exercising oversight of budget execution. In addition, the review identified institutional and behavioural criteria as the normative framework within which to evaluate the effectiveness of the current legal and institutional measures for oversight of budget execution in South African municipalities.</p>