Conference Agenda

We exploit monetary thresholds in Brazil's Procurement Law that assign public contracts

to procurement procedures with different degrees of formality and discretion.

Combining administrative procurement records with independent audit evidence

from the Office of the Comptroller-General (CGU), we implement a

regression-discontinuity design using audit-based measures of corruption and

procurement mismanagement. Rule tightening has no systematic effect on

corruption across outcomes, procurement types, or municipality sizes. In

contrast, stricter rules reduce procurement mismanagement in settings where

procedural standardization is most likely to matter: the first threshold

robustly lowers mismanagement in public works among smaller municipalities,

while the second provides more qualified evidence of lower mismanagement in

purchases. These effects tend to be stronger in smaller municipalities and

less stable as larger municipalities are added to the sample, consistent with

diminishing returns to formal rules as administrative capacity increases.

Procurement regulation therefore appears to improve local-government

performance primarily through administrative discipline rather than corruption

deterrence.

We study the extent of a one-size-fits-all approach in the design of public procurement (PP) tenders using comprehensive data from Finland. We show that crucial PP design features related to auction and contract rules tend to have significant lack of variation across different tenders for different industries within a contracting authority. We show that this organizational rigidness is due to both organizational level culture and individual employee level work habit formation with the latter being more important. We find that both greater organizational rigidity and deviating from the national industry norms are associated with lower number of bids and higher probability of zero-bid tenders, pointing to a potential efficiency loss from organizational rigidness in PP, and offering a solution that buyers should mimic how other organizations typically buy similar products rather than how they themselves buy very different products.

When political leadership is captured, bureaucrats may either become instruments of corrupt rule or act as a buffer that constrains its effects. We examine these competing expectations in the context of Italian municipalities infiltrated by mafia organizations. Leveraging a 1991 law that allows the central government to dissolve captured municipal councils, we study how bureaucratic performance responds when political corruption is abruptly removed. Using a difference-in-differences design with matched controls based on a machine-learning index of mafia-infiltration risk, we show that dissolutions substantially reduce payment delays, indicating improved bureaucratic performance. Evidence from administrative data and investigative reports suggests these gains are driven by behavioral responses—such as improved morale and reduced shirking— and allows us to rule out alternative mechanisms. The findings show that political capture weakens state capacity by distorting politician–bureaucrat relations, and that bureaucracies can mitigate its downstream consequences rather than amplify them.

This study examines how the size of political bodies affects local public finances in Italian municipalities. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences approach, it shows that larger executives increase expenditures, mainly through investment spending financed by intergovernmental transfers, while larger councils tend to constrain spending. The results suggest that executive specialization and council fragmentation shape fiscal outcomes in opposite directions. Voters appear to reward executive-led spending, improving the political careers of mayors and executive members, but not councilors. Overall, the study shows how bargaining between differently sized branches of local government influences fiscal policy.