We study the ex-ante budget devoted by a Political Principal to a Competition Authority in charge of collecting evidence on the Industry's behavior. The Industry can capture both the Principal (lobbying) for a reduced budget, and the Authority (side-contracting) so as to avoid fines. Authority's...

A seminal result in the theory of competitive bidding holds that the buyer can lower the expected awarding price of a procurement contract by setting a reserve price below her opportunity cost for realizing the project. In this paper, we first provide a non-technical explanation for this result,...

We estimate, using a previously unexploited set of data for the Italian public debt, quarterly yield curves over the period 1970-1996 to test the main implications of the expectations hypothesis theory (EH). Our empirical results show that short-term interest rates move according to the...

This short piece discusses a (rather informal) survey of approximately two dozen public procurement experts (including University professors, consultants, national regulators, multilateral development bank members, and lawyers; all chosen primarily based upon their prior dealings with Professor...

This paper represents one of the first attempts to benchmarking public procurement practices for the same product categories. Questionnaires from European procurement agencies provide several insights on procurement contest design and on participation and competition patterns of two important...

Procurement procedures are made of many distinct parts, on which the buyer can intervene to adapt the process to the product, service or work that he wants to procure. This paper analyses differences and similarities among public procurement practices adopted worldwide. Results are based on data...

In 1975 Niels Thygesen, together with eight other economists - one of us among them - published in The Economist a "manifesto" proposing a new common currency for Europe (Basevi et al., 1975). His co-operation on this subject was pursued within a smaller group, and resulted in the publication of...

Why do dynamic inconsistencies in monetary policy exist? In this paper a traditional model without put inefficiencies is introduced, but monetary policy is allowed to be influenced by the various constituencies in the economy, that pressure Congress in turn to pressure the central bank to adopt...

Today, the European Union (EU) and in particular its common currency area created in 1998, the Eurozone, is going through an economic crisis that, given its duration, can be defined as structural and enduring and is such as to put the common political project at risk. This article retraces the...

pt. 1. Competitive dialogue and contractual design fostering innovation and needs analysis -- pt. 2. Separation of selection and award criteria, including exclusion of reputation indicators like references to experience, performance and CVs from award criteria -- pt. 3. Re-tendering a contract...