We examine how the U.S. Federal Government governs R&D contracts with private-sector firms. The government chooses between two contractual forms: grants and cooperative agreements. The latter provides the government substantially greater discretion over, and monitoring of, project progress....

The government wants an infrastructure-based public service to be provided. First, the infrastructure has to be built; subsequently, it has to be operated. Should the government bundle the building and operating tasks in a public-private partnership? Or should it choose traditional procurement,...

Public procurement is the central sourcing mechanism evoked to directly secure the delivery of public services. It may however also be used to achieve certain social outcomes and secondary effects. This paper attempts to contribute with knowledge regarding a particular secondary effect, the role...

This paper analyzes a procurement setting with two identical firms and stochasticinnovations. In contrast to the previous literature, I show that a procurer who cannot charge entry fees may prefer a fixed-prize tournament to a first-price auction since holding an auction may leave higher rents...

We explore which start-ups win in public procurement. Most notably, our analysis presents significant differences between firms applying for tenders with and without functional criteria. First, we use representative telephone survey data to estimate public procurement applicant and winner shares...

Governments purchase everything from airplanes to zucchini. This paper investigates whether the technological intensity of government demand affects corporate R&Dactivities. In a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth, we show that an increase in the share of government purchases in high-tech...

This paper investigates the relevance of government purchasing behavior for innovation-based economic growth. We construct a parsimonious Schumpeterian growth model in which demand from the public sphere can effectively alter the economy's rate of technological change. We incorporate results of...

We consider procurement of an innovation from heterogeneous sellers. Innovations are random but depend on unobservable effort and private information. We compare two procurement mechanisms where potential sellers first bid in an auction for admission to an innovation contest. After the contest,...

In den letzten Jahren hat die Diskussion über die Effekte öffentlicher Nachfrage als Motor für Innovationstätigkeit und Wirtschaftswachstum in Deutschland und international eine neue Dynamik entfaltet. Helge Dauchert, Dietmar Harhoff und Patrick Llerena, Expertenkommission Forschung und...

One rationale for the infant industry argument is that, by protecting domestic firms from foreign competition, this increases rents and investment in innovation and other growth enhancing measures. Using data on 4,750 firms across 13 developing countries, we examine whether protection via...