Research Coffee

Research Coffee is a series of events aimed to be a platform for discussions about publications, projects, and working papers of AAU Faculty as well as AAU students. Prior registration is required for this event.

Our next session will be hosted by three speakers – Peter Bolcha (AAU, IREF Fellow), Michael Fanta (Jan Evangelista Purkyně University), and Pavla Vozárová (AAU, UCT Prague, IREF Fellow), presenting their paper on “Transport Infrastructure Expenditure in Czechia: Law Compliance in the Public Procurement”. Dr. Filip Pertold (Researcher at CERGE-EI) and Mr. David Ondráčka (Member of Global Board of Directors, Transparency International) will be joining us as discussants of the paper.
You can find the abstract of the paper below, but to receive the full paper and the link to the meeting, please register in advance. We look forward to seeing you!

Abstract:
Our paper intends to contribute to the discussion on public procurement by searching for patterns in information published on official portals connected to procurement projects in the Czech Republic. This article creates and uses a unique match of two datasets related to (1) procurement projects announcements and (2) the publication of public contracts, both compulsory by law in pre-defined sets of cases. To check the compliance and patterns in missing data, we focus on the spread of the estimated and final prices for individual procurement awards. In order to control for characteristics of the awards, we employ regression analysis to explain the spread more precisely.Our preliminary results are: we observe high compliance of publishing the contracts, we observe high censorship that may turn publishing contracts into a formal exercise, we find a high volume of legal exceptions (both not to announce and not to publish a contract, interestingly the latter without a monetary limit). The regression results confirm the expectations set by prior research (the number of bidders and open regimes lead to more savings of public resources), as well as bring new insights on the relation of spread to mistakes and publishing compliance (missing contract in a case when the contracting authority is legally bound to publish it is correlated with worse economic outcome of the procurement process; missing information signals worse outcomes as well).

This project was financially supported with the IREF Fellowship provided by the Institute for Research in Economic and Fiscal Issues.