Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors while others assign public contracts more impartially? According to the research, such variation responds to differences in political institutions, economic development and historical preconditions. This paper instead emphasizes the...

Private sector companies develop a diverse set of political connections in high and low corruption countries alike. Using political connections to gain advantage when competing for government contracts is a major form of corruption from Denmark to Italy. Recognizing the difficulty of controlling...

Public sector corruption misapplies resources, increases poverty and discourages investment. Corruption, and allegations of corruption, also weakens democratic institutions. This paper sets out a scheme for a Public Sector Ethics Infrastructure in Jamaica. This proposal seeks to improve public...

After the 2014 uprising against widespread corruption under former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, a group of civic activists and data experts decided to overhaul government procurement. Their efforts produced an open-source e-procurement system, ProZorro (“transparency” in...

Exploiting a rule in Brazil that waives competitive bidding for small-value purchases, I find evidence of an efficiency-quality trade-off when government agencies have more flexibility in awarding public procurement contracts. Products purchased with higher discretion are 23 percent more...

Spanish Abstract: La transparencia y la competencia se han enmarcado como las herramientas fundamentales para combatir la corrupción en la contratación estatal. Por consiguiente, se han implementado diferentes políticas públicas encaminadas a fortalecer las mismas. Un ejemplo claro de esto...

Measuring high-level corruption and government favouritism has been the object of extensive scholarly and policy interest with relatively little progress in the last decade. In order to address the lack of reliable indicators, this article develops two objective proxy measures of high-level...

We consider a procurement problem in which the procurement agent is supposed to allocate the realization of a project according to a competitive mechanism that values bids in terms of the proposed price and quality. Potential bidders have private information about their production costs. Since...

In several strategy documents, the Department of Defense has suggested that it may experiment with public-private partnerships (P3s) as catalysts for innovation. This policy is misguided. P3s may prove especially disappointing if they are merely a neologism for a continuation of the same old...

This paper studies whether political budget cycles occur in public procurement in the European Union. Using project- level data from Tenders Electronic Daily (2008-2018), I analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the...