This paper provides evidence that, by restoring market functioning, central banks' pandemic-related asset purchase programmes lowered payoff complementarities among investors in corporate bond funds, reinforcing asset managers' willingness to hold riskier assets to increase funds' returns....

The Allowance for Corporate Equity (ACE) introduced in Italy in 2011 has decreased the fiscal distortion between the costs of equity and debt by introducing the deductibility from taxable income of a notional return on capital increases. In this paper we estimate the impact of the ACE on the...

Auctions are supposed to procure the best deal money can buy. Yet, practitioners who procure complex contracts by auction are well aware of some basic pitfalls. One concern is that winning bids may not reflect the quality of the bidder but strategic behavior like low-balling bids or...

We explore empirically the impact of buyer quality on public procurement outcomes. Using purchases data (Federal Procurement Data System) and survey data (Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey) from US federal agencies, we find that procurement quality is highly heterogeneous across different...