Costs for Swedish public transport authorities in tendered bus contracts

The main objective of this paper is to investigate how different factors affect costs for Swedish Public Transport Authorities (PTA). A theoretical framework is presented for the empirics, a cross sectional regression analysis with cost and supply data from 20 Swedish counties for the year 2012. The most important results are that a one percentage increase in output yield a lower than one percentage increase in cost. The usage of incentives scheme contract do not increase total costs. Lastly, contracts operated by publicly owned operators seem to give higher costs for the PTAs.