How important are bureaucrats for the productivity of the state? And to what extent do the tradeoffs between different policies depend on the implementing bureaucrats' effectiveness? Using data on 16million public procurement purchases in Russia during 2011–2016, we show that over 40 percent...

Disputes over penalties for breach of contract are often solved in court. A simple model shows how inefficient courts may induce public buyers to refrain from enforcing penalties for late delivery to avoid litigation, inducing sellers to delay. Using a large dataset on Italian public...

This study assesses the causal effect of the inefficiency of the judicial system on the delay in the execution of public contracts. We apply a border-discontinuity design that leverages the variation in the length of civil proceedings across Italian jurisdictions and a granular dataset of public...