Discriminatory programs that favor local and small firms in government procurement are common in many countries. This paper studies the long-run impact of procurement discrimination on market structure and future competition in industries where learning-by-doing makes incumbent firms more...

This paper analyzes theoretically and empirically how upstream markets are affected by deregulation downstream. Deregulation tends to increase the level of uncertainty in the upstream market. Our theoretical analysis predicts that deregulated firms respond to this increase in uncertainty by...

Cost overrun is ubiquitous in public procurement. We argue that this can be the result of a constraint optimal award procedure when the procurer cannot commit not to renegotiate. If cost differences are more pronounced for more complex designs, it is optimal to fix a simple design ex ante and to...

We analyse procurement auctions in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money that they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the offered quality of the technology or good. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus,...

We investigate empirically the effect of government purchases on unemployment in 20 OECD countries, for the period 1960-2007. Compared to earlier studies we use a data set with more variation in unemployment, and which allows for controlling for a host of factors that influence the effect of...

In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of a social public procurement policy in Switzerland that gives firms that train apprentices' a preferential treatment. We estimate the effectiveness of this social procurement policy on a firm's training participation, training intensity, and training...

This paper analyzes the effects of specific and ad valorem taxation in an industry with downstream and upstream oligopoly. We find that in the short run, i.e. when the number of firms in both markets is exogenous, the results concerning tax incidence tend to be qualitatively similar to models...

It is believed that market power of the input supplier, charging a linear price, is detrimental for the consumers since it creates the double marginalisation problem. We show that this view may not be true if the final goods producers can adopt strategies to reduce rent extraction by the input...