Recent research has identified situations in which instrumental variables (IV) estimators are severely biased and has suggested diagnostic tests to identify such situations. We suggest a number of alternative techniques for choosing a set of instruments that satisfy these tests from a universe...

We study the effects of politics on public procurement in Swedish municipalities in 1990-98 using data on cleaning services. No procuring municipality committed to a standard auction format or to an explicit scoring rule. Political identity of the governing party is not correlated with the...

The EU procurement directives stipulate that public contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder or to the bidder with the economically most advantageous offer; the latter requiring that a scoring rule must be specified. We provide a simple theoretical framework for tender evaluation and discuss...