We investigate how the functioning of public procurement is affected by the time politicians have stayed in office. We match a data set on public procurement auctions by Italian municipalities to a data set on the politics of municipal governments. For each municipality, we relate the mayor's...

This report investigates corruption risk of EU funds spending in Hungary within the framework of the Public Procurement Law. Its finding is that in spite of what is a tight regulatory framework EU funds are likely to fuel the abuse of public spending. Even though public procurement using EU...

This paper develops 30 novel quantitative indicators of grand corruption that operationalize 20 distinct techniques of corruption in the context of public procurement. Each indicator rests on a thorough qualitative understanding of rent extraction from public contracts by corrupt networks as...

Although both the academic and policy communities have attached great importance to measuring corruption, most of the currently available measures are biased and too broad to test theory or guide policy. This article proposes a new composite indicator of grand corruption based on a wide range of...

The reform of the Italian public administration has been a priority for at least two decades, with several major initiatives undertaken toward modernization and simplification. Notwithstanding laudable intentions, however, progress remains limited. This analysis is a case study of two reforms...

In this work we compare three alternative procedures aimed at selecting a private partner in PPP projects: i.e. negotiation, auction and competitive negotiation. We show how the suitability of each of these selection mechanisms depends on many economic and institutional factors: e.g. the extent...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) involve the supply by the private sector of infrastructure and services deriving from infrastructure assets which have traditionally been supplied by the public sector. PPPs are spreading all over the world. It may be quite plausible that such arrangements were...

Corrupt practices in the assignment of government contracts are largely diffused and can generate misallocation of resources across firms. We study how disclosure of such practices affects firm growth and labor reallocation. We exploit exogenous variation in the exposure of illegally favored...

This paper has adopted the exploratory case study method of analyzing a few recent cases of public procurement irregularities on Indian Railways documented by the vigilance departments and the CAG available in public domain to inquire into the following issues: (a) how do irregularities and...

Using a dataset of medical devices purchased by Italian Public Buyers (PBs), for each purchase, we measure the difference between each item's price and its marginal cost. We define PBs' ability in purchasing as PBs' fixed effect (FE) on that difference. We find that average prices vary...