This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

This paper analyzes a prominent dimension of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic observed in many countries: the imposition of export restrictions and actions to facilitate imports. Using weekly data on the use of trade policy instruments during the first seven months of the...

The EU's single market in government purchases constitutes a fundamental pillar of economic integration throughout the continent, as it amounts to 4% of GDP. If competition is deficient efficiency losses ensue. As we know surprisingly little about the effectiveness of monitoring and enforcement...

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...

A home-bias in public purchases can have non-trivial efficiency effects, especially in times of crises. Using unexplored Japanese and Swiss public procurement data over 1990-2003, we examine the presence of a home-bias by controlling for the effect of macroeconomic, political economy,...

Baldwin and Richardson (1972) and Miyagiwa (1991) laid out the conditions under which a home-bias in public procurement is rendered ineffective as a protectionist device. Since then there has been little empirical work on this subject. In this paper, we bridge this gap by building a new dataset...

In this paper we document border effects in the award of public contracts in the European Single Market. We use a data set of 1.8 million contract awards that have been matched to geo-locations to estimate a gravity model of procurement flows between European NUTS3 region pairs. Cross-national...

Dual pricing is a practice through which resource-endowed states sell their energy resources at significantly lower prices on the domestic market, as compared to the price on the export market. Dual pricing could be considered an environmentally harmful fossil fuel subsidy: States that maintain...