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...

This paper studies the existence of election cycles in public procurement in the European Union for the national level. We analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the contract, and the project completion. We point out...

A key issue in strategic management in the public sector is how government creates economic and social value through procurement. Unfortunately, most procurement studies are based on contract theories, which fail to incorporate the growing role of strategic management in performance. We fill...

We evaluate the impact of a major European state aid program for broadband deployment applied to rural areas in the German State of Bavaria in the years 2010 and 2011. Using difference-in-differences estimation strategies, we find that aided municipalities have - depending on broadband quality -...

I study the problem of allocating objects among agents without using money. Agents can receive several objects and have dichotomous preferences, meaning that they either consider objects to be acceptable or not. In this set-up, the egalitarian solution is more appealing than the competitive...

Arbitrarily designed borders have been identified by a recent literature as an important reason why sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the poorest regions on the globe. Accordingly, border changes may be a way to promote growth on the African continent. In this paper, we study the effect of...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

Procurement regulation aimed at curbing discrimination requires equal treatment of sellers. However, Deb and Pai (2017) show that such regulation imposes virtually no restrictions on the ability to discriminate. We propose a simple rule - imitation perfection - that restricts discrimination...

We study the long-run implications of regional and ethnic favoritism in Africa. Combining geocoded individual-level survey data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with data on national leaders' birthplaces across 41 African countries, we explore the educational attainment of adults who...