In 2011, the federal government accelerated payments to their small business contractors, spanning virtually every county and industry in the US. We study the impact of this reform on county-sector employment growth over the subsequent three years. Despite firms being paid just 15 days sooner,...

We examine how the U.S. Federal Government governs R&D contracts with private-sector firms. The government chooses between two contractual forms: grants and cooperative agreements. The latter provides the government substantially greater discretion over, and monitoring of, project progress....

This paper proposes an estimation method for a repeated auction game under the presence of capacity contraints. The estimation strategy is computationally simple as it does not require solving for the equilibrium of the game. It uses a two stage approach. In the first stage the distribution of...

This paper investigates the consequences of an exogenous increase in U.S. government purchases. We find that in response to such a shock, employment, output, and nonresidential investment rise, while real wages, residential investment, and consumption expenditures fall. The paper argues that a...

We examine the institutional details of the school milk procurement process, bidding data, statements of dairy executives, and supply characteristics in Ohio during the 1980's. We compare the bidding behavior of a group of firms to a control group. We find that the behavior of each of the firms...

This paper examines bidding in auctions for state highway construction contracts on Long Island in the early 1980s, in order to determine whether bid rigging occurred. Detection of collusion is possible because of limited participation in the collusive scheme. The paper looks at differences in...

We attempt to make inferences about the elasticity of the government's demand for specific weapons by analyzing the statistical relationship between quantity and cost revisions across the population of major weapon systems, using data contained in the Pentagon's Selected Acquisition Reports. The...

This paper examines the dynamic impact of government purchases in a simple general equilibrium model with both durable and non-durable consumer goods as well as productive capital. The model generates perhaps surprising results. In particular, increases in government purchases are shown to cause...

Because of a small direct negative effect on private spending, temporary variations in government purchases as in wartime, would have a strong positive effect on aggregate demand. Intertemporal substitution effects would direct work and production toward these periods where output was valued...

We design a field experiment to study how the allocation of authority between frontline procurement officers and their monitors affects performance both directly and through the response to incentives. In collaboration with the government of Punjab, Pakistan, we shift authority from monitors to...