This paper presents evidence on the perverse trade-off that first price auctions induce between low prices at the awarding stage and poor ex post performance when bids are not binding commitments. By exploiting the different timing with which first price auctions were introduced in Italy to...

Countries choose different strategies when responding to crises. It is challenging to assess the impact of these policy choices on key variables, however, because of endogeneity and selection bias. This paper addresses these challenges by using propensity-score matching to estimate how major...