IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aejpol/v9y2017i3p59-105.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Tenure in Office and Public Procurement

Author

Listed:
  • Decio Coviello
  • Stefano Gagliarducci

Abstract

We study the impact of politicians' tenure in office on the outcomes of public procurement using a dataset on Italian municipal governments. To identify a causal relation, we first compare elections where the incumbent mayor barely won or barely lost another term. We then use the introduction of a two-term limit, which granted one potential extra term to mayors appointed before the reform. The main result is that an increase in tenure is associated with "worse" procurement outcomes. Our estimates are informative of the possibility that time in office progressively leads to collusion between government officials and local bidders.

Suggested Citation

  • Decio Coviello & Stefano Gagliarducci, 2017. "Tenure in Office and Public Procurement," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 59-105, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:aea:aejpol:v:9:y:2017:i:3:p:59-105
    Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20150426
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150426
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=x8KPPsAUmFss0kUVq3btuXLmsEm-qCFF
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=aTi8watvXdmaG5Nsli6xFpvlkF55OXvL
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Luis Garicano & Ignacio Palacios-Huerta & Canice Prendergast, 2005. "Favoritism Under Social Pressure," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(2), pages 208-216, May.
    2. Ernesto Dal Bó & Martín Rossi, 2008. "Term Length and Political Performance," NBER Working Papers 14511, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Ingraham Allan T, 2005. "A Test for Collusion between a Bidder and an Auctioneer in Sealed-Bid Auctions," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-34, September.
    4. Paulo K. Monteiro & Flavio M. Menezes, 2000. "original papers : Auctions with endogenous participation," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 5(1), pages 71-89.
    5. Mailath, George J. & Samuelson, Larry, 2006. "Repeated Games and Reputations: Long-Run Relationships," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780195300796.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Coviello, Decio & Gagliarducci, Stefano, 2010. "Building Political Collusion: Evidence from Procurement Auctions," IZA Discussion Papers 4939, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Juan‐Pablo Montero & Juan Ignacio Guzman, 2010. "Output‐Expanding Collusion In The Presence Of A Competitive Fringe," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(1), pages 106-126, March.
    3. Paul Bose & Eberhard Feess & Helge Mueller, 2022. "Favoritism towards High-Status Clubs: Evidence from German Soccer," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 38(2), pages 422-478.
    4. Tobias Salz & Emanuel Vespa, 2020. "Estimating dynamic games of oligopolistic competition: an experimental investigation," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 51(2), pages 447-469, June.
    5. Daron Acemoglu & Matthew O. Jackson, 2017. "Social Norms and the Enforcement of Laws," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 15(2), pages 245-295.
    6. Kimmo Berg & Gijs Schoenmakers, 2017. "Construction of Subgame-Perfect Mixed-Strategy Equilibria in Repeated Games," Games, MDPI, vol. 8(4), pages 1-14, November.
    7. , & ,, 2015. "A folk theorem for stochastic games with infrequent state changes," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 10(1), January.
    8. Peyman Khezr & Flavio M. Menezes, 2021. "Entry and social efficiency under Bertrand competition and asymmetric information," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 50(4), pages 927-944, December.
    9. Ernesto Dal Bó & Pedro Dal Bó & Rafael Di Tella, 2007. "Reputation When Threats and Transfers Are Available," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 16(3), pages 577-598, September.
    10. Carmona, Guilherme & Carvalho, Luís, 2016. "Repeated two-person zero-sum games with unequal discounting and private monitoring," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 131-138.
    11. David M. Waguespack & Robert Salomon, 2016. "Quality, Subjectivity, and Sustained Superior Performance at the Olympic Games," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(1), pages 286-300, January.
    12. Bramoullé, Yann & Goyal, Sanjeev, 2016. "Favoritism," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 16-27.
    13. Sander Heinsalu, 2018. "Corrigendum to "Managerial Incentive Problems: A Dynamic Perspective"," Papers 1811.00455, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2018.
    14. Nicolas Vieille, 2010. "Recursive Methods in Discounted Stochastic Games: An Algorithm for - 1 and a Folk Theorem," Post-Print hal-00543616, HAL.
    15. Alex Krumer & Mosi Rosenboim & Offer Moshe Shapir, 2016. "Gender, Competitiveness, and Physical Characteristics," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 17(3), pages 234-259, April.
    16. Jungmin Lee, 2008. "Outlier Aversion in Subjective Evaluation," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 9(2), pages 141-159, April.
    17. Alberto Galasso & Mihkel Tombak, 2014. "Switching to Green: The Timing of Socially Responsible Innovation," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 23(3), pages 669-691, September.
    18. Christian Hilbe & Moshe Hoffman & Martin A. Nowak, 2015. "Cooperate without Looking in a Non-Repeated Game," Games, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-15, September.
    19. Strobl, Günter, 2022. "A theory of procyclical market liquidity," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    20. Larionov, Daniil, 2023. "Full surplus extraction from colluding bidders," ZEW Discussion Papers 23-029, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H57 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Procurement
    • H76 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - Other Expenditure Categories

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:aejpol:v:9:y:2017:i:3:p:59-105. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.