In response to increasing health expenditures and a high number of physician visits, the German government introduced a copayment for ambulatory care in 2004 for individuals with statutory health insurance (SHI). Because persons with private insurance were exempt from the copayments, this health...

Governments are known to prefer domestic over foreign suppliers in the award of procurement contracts despite cost and quality considerations. Literature exploring this “home-bias” in public purchases has exclusively focused on the microeconomic interplay between the tendering entity and the...

Commissioned by the European Commission, the Final Report for the EU-Canada Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) on the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) provides a comprehensive assessment of the potential impacts of trade liberalisation under CETA. The analysis...

This paper studies the government procurement of services from foreign suppliers by conducting a statistical analysis of data submitted by Japan and Switzerland to the WTO's Committee on Government Procurement. Using several metrics, the paper examines whether the WTO’s Agreement on Government...

This paper aims at analysing the procurement of public works paying attention to the level of government involved. Such an issue has not received so far attention in the literature on fiscal federalism nor in the public works procurement literature. We focus the attention upon the execution...

In this paper we argue that government procurement policy played a role in stimulating the wave of innovation that hit the US economy in the 1980's, as well as the simultaneous increase in inequality and in education attainment. Since the early 1980's U.S. policy makers began targeting...

This paper models a contest where several sellers compete for a contract with a single buyer. There are several styles of possible designs with a subset of them preferred by the buyer. We examine what happens when the buyer communicates information about his preferences. If the sellers are...

We empirically assess the winner’s curse effect in auctions for toll road concessions. First, we investigate the overall winner’s curse effects on bidding behaviour. Second, we account for differing levels of common-value components. Third, we investigate whether the possibility of...

We consider a model consisting of a monopolistic firm producing a certain good with pollution. This firm can adopt a cleaner technology within a finite time by incurring an investment cost decreasing exponentially with the adoption date. At each period of time, the firm is regulated by an...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the optimal enforcement of the penal code when criminals invest in a specific class of avoidance activities termed dissembling activities (i.e. self-protection efforts undertaken by criminals to hedge their illegal gains in case of detection and...